scholarly journals The Remains of the Fray: Nascent Colonialism and Heterogeneous Hybridity

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Charles R. Cobb ◽  
James B. Legg ◽  
Steven D. Smith ◽  
Chester B. DePratter ◽  
Brad R. Lieb ◽  
...  

Investigations at the Native American site complex of Stark Farms in Mississippi, USA, have yielded numerous examples of metal artifacts of European origin. Our study suggests that they derive from contact between the AD 1540–1541 winter encampment of the Spanish Hernando de Soto expedition and the local Indigenous polity. The artifacts display a wide range of modifications, uses, and depositional contexts congruent with hybrid practices. We argue that the early colonial setting of Stark Farms requires a different perspective on cultural mixing than is often applied in studies of European colonialism. This is highlighted by the strongly improvisational nature of the modification of the metal objects, embodying a political climate in which European incursions were precarious and in which hybridity and power were heterogeneous and fluid.

Sederi ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 25-45
Author(s):  
Mª Carmen Gomez Galisteo

Most observers of Native Americans during the contact period between Europe and the Americas represented Native American women as monstrous beings posing potential threats to the Europeans’ physical integrity. However, the most well known portrait of Native American women is John Smith’s description of Pocahontas, the Native American princess who, the legend goes, saved Smith from being executed. Transformed into a children’s tale, further popularized by the Disney movie, as well as being the object of innumerable historical studies questioning or asserting the veracity of Smith’s claims, the fact remains that the Smith-Pocahontas story is at the very core of North American culture. Nevertheless, far from being original, John Smith’s story had a precedent in the story of Spaniard Juan Ortiz, a member of the ill-fated Narváez expedition to Florida in 1527. Ortiz, who got lost in America and spent the rest of his life there, was also rescued by a Native American princess from being sacrificed in the course of a Native American ritual, as recounted by the Gentleman of Elvas, member of the Hernando de Soto expedition. Yet another vision of Native American women is that offered by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, another participant of the Narváez expedition who, during almost a decade in the Americas fulfilled a number of roles among the Native Americans, including some that were regarded as female roles. These female roles provided him with an opportunity to avert captivity as well as a better understanding of gender roles within Native American civilization. This essay explores the description of Native American women posed by John Smith, Juan Ortiz and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca so as to illustrate different images of Native American women during the early contact period as conveyed by these works.


2011 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 115-128
Author(s):  
Juha Hiltunen

Only a few decades ago a common perception prevailed that the historic­al Native Americans were very prone to violence and warfare. Scalping and torture were seen as a specific custom attached into their ideology and sociocultural ethos. However in the 1960s a completely reversed picture started to emerge, following the course of other worldwide movements, such as ethnic rights, pan-Indianism, ecological conscience, revisionist historiography and so on. Immediately the Native American people came to be seen as the victims of the European colonialism and the Whites were the bad guys who massacred innocent women and children, either at Sand Creek or in Vietnam. Books were written in which the historians pointed out that the practice of scalping was actually not present in the Americas before the whites came. This theory drew sustenance from some early colonial accounts, especially from the Dutch and New England colonies, where it was documented that a special bounty was offered for Indian scalps. According to this idea, the practice of scalping among the Indians escalated only after this. On the other hand, the blame fell on the Iroquois tribesmen, whose cruel fighting spread terror throughout the seventeenth century, when they expanded an empire in the north eastern wilderness. This accords with those theorists who wanted to maintain a more balanced view of the diffusion of scalping and torture, agreeing that these traits were indeed present in Pre-Columbian America, but limited only to the Iroquoians of the east. Colonial American history has been rewritten every now and then. In the 1980s, and in the field of archaeology especially, a completely new set of insights have arisen. There has been a secondary burial of the myth of Noble Savage and a return of the old Wild Indian idea, but this time stripped of its cartoon stereo­typical attachments. The Indians are now seen as being like any other human beings, with their usual mixture of vices and virtues. Understanding this, one may approach such a topic as scalping and torture without more bias than when reading of any practice of atrocities in human history.


Author(s):  
Vijaya Ramadas Mandala

The main contention of Shooting a Tiger is that hunting during the colonial period was not merely a recreational activity, but a practice intimately connected with imperial governance. The book positions shikar or hunting at the heart of colonial rule by demonstrating that, for the British in India, it served as a political, practical, and symbolic apparatus in the consolidation of power and rule during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book analyses early colonial hunting during the Company period, and then surveys different aspects of hunting during the high imperial decades in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book draws upon an impressive array of archival material and uses a wide range of evidence to support its contentions. It examines hunting at a variety of social and ethnic levels—military, administrative, elite, princely India, Indian professional hunters, and in terms of Indian auxiliaries and (sometimes) resisters. It also deals with different geographical contexts—the plains, the mountains, north and south India. The exclusive privilege of hunting exercised by the ruling classes, following colonial forest legislation, continued to be extended to the Indian princes who played a critical role in sustaining the lavish hunts that became the hallmark of the late nineteenth-century British Raj. Hunting was also a way of life in colonial India, undertaken by officials and soldiers alike alongside their everyday duties, necessary for their mental sustenance and vital for the smooth operation of the colonial administration. There are also two final chapters on conservation, particularly the last chapter focusing on two British hunter-turned-conservationists, Jim Corbett and Colonel Richard Burton.


1995 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 288-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip A. May ◽  
James R. Moran

Purpose. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of a wide range of potentially useful strategies to address the prevention of alcohol misuse among American Indians. This broad approach to the review is useful because the extreme heterogeneity of the American Indian population requires that health promotion professionals explore many options and tailor their activities to specific communities. Search Method. A literature search was initiated through MEDLINE using the following key words: prevention, alcohol, substance abuse, American Indian, and Native American. The search yielded 29 articles from the years 1982 through 1994. These articles, along with 45 previously identified in three overview articles, form the basis of the review and discussion in this paper. Summary of findings. As a group, American Indians experience many health problems that are related to alcohol misuse. Comparison of Indians to non-Indians shows that the age of first involvement with alcohol is younger, the frequency and amount of drinking is greater, and negative consequences are more common. Health promotion programs that address these issues must take into account American Indian heterogeneity and should use a comprehensive approach that addresses both heavy drinking and the sequelae of problems related to alcohol misuse. Major Conclusions. Important concepts for providing health promotion services to this population are: cultural relevance must be carefully planned and monitored; individuals in the local community must be involved; the drunken Indian stereotype must be addressed; and community empowerment should be an important goal.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Scott

This chapter provides a historical and geographical background and situates the volume’s contributions in the context of previous archaeological research into the French in the New World. The chapter discusses the ways in which French settlers made their presence felt on the landscape and on Native groups through a wide range of settlement types, economic and social networks, and successive generations of habitation. The chapter reviews both the well-studied French colonial period and the lesser known post-Conquest period, after the Treaty of Versailles and after the ancien régime fell, during which communities of Francophone peoples (ethnic French, Native American, and African) continued to live in the New World.


Author(s):  
William Beinart ◽  
Lotte Hughes

In the remaining chapters we will focus increasingly on the response by colonized people to competition for, and commodification of, conquered environments. Political conflict over natural resources had deep historical roots in the Empire, and these issues were not resolved by dominion status for the British settler states nor decolonization after the Second World War. They fed into the politics of decolonization and into environmental debates within and beyond the post-colonial Commonwealth. Subsequent chapters traverse the moment of decolonization and explore elements of late twentieth-century political ecology. In South Asia and Africa state attempts to control and regulate natural resources changed power relations in the countryside and triggered popular resistance. Through conquest or annexation, some colonial and protectorate governments not only alienated large swathes of territory, but also assumed responsibility for and asserted rights over the natural environment. The governments of settler states moved to protect environments from careless settlers who ransacked it for wildlife or timber, and from indigenous peoples whose land-management systems were regarded as destructive. In some cases conservators recognized that European settlers wreaked more havoc than indigenes; Sim said of the Cape forests that the ‘Hottentot and Bushman inhabitants … were not intentionally destructive … But the advent of European civilization boded greater ill to the forests, and rapidly enough that ill has been accomplished.’ And some, such as Howard, saw value in local agrarian systems. But although regulation could affect all colonial subjects, it tended to bear most heavily on indigenous people. Colonial governments introduced policies of excluding humans from protected areas, as well as a wide range of other measures aimed at curbing customary user rights and maximizing state revenue. Stiff penalties were introduced to punish those who broke the new regulations, and thus the rise of bureaucratic conservationism often led to the criminalization of local resource extractors. In settler colonies the privatization of land transformed socio-environmental relationships, barring local communities from accessing resources they had long regarded as communally held and managed. In some early colonial settlements, this process echoed the enclosures of common land in eighteenth-century England. At a fundamental level it changed the value people placed upon land, setting in train a process towards individualized tenure, commercialization, and subdivision of territory.


2007 ◽  
Vol 1047 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lesley Frame ◽  
Pamela B. Vandiver

AbstractGodin Tepe lies along the “High Road” leading from the Mesopotamian lowlands to the northern Iranian Plateau and beyond. This site acted as a center for the exchange of goods, transmission of ideas, and spread of technology; therefore the technology and manufacturing methods represented by the artifacts at this site provide information regarding the technology in use across the Iranian Plateau. Materials analyzed from Godin Tepe include crucibles, furnace and tuyere fragments, ore, and metal artifacts dating to the early third through late second millennium B.C.E. The production materials were concentrated in only a few locations throughout the site, and they are indicative of small scale production. SEM and microprobe analyses have allowed the determination of cooling rates and temperatures attained during smelting and casting operations in antiquity. In addition, the analysis of approximately 60 metal artifacts (out of the two-hundred plus that were excavated) have contributed greatly to understanding the variability in manufacture methods present during this time period. The results of this investigation support two significant conclusions. First, the measurement and evaluation of secondary dendrite arm spacing of cast artifacts and crucible prills provides insight to the processes and cooling methods employed by ancient craftsmen. Second, the wide range in manufacturing methods shown by the microstructures of non-utilitarian artifacts, offers strong evidence for the presence of multiple producers who copied styles and typology, but not technological methods from their contemporary craftsmen.


1977 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 627-633 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. J. Wapshere ◽  
A. A. Kirk

AbstractThe gracillariid leaf miner Dialectica scalariella (Zell.), which occurs in Mediterranean Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and the Canaries, is a potential biological control agent for the weed Echium plantagineum in Australia. The moth has a high fecundity and oviposits on the leaves of Echium spp. and other Boraginaceae. The larvae destroy the leaves by forming large bulbous blotch mines. There are 5-7 generations per year. Host restriction of D. scalariella to Boraginaceae was tested by exposing a wide range of cultivated plants considered to be most at risk from it because of their close relation to Boraginaceae, because they were of Australian or non-European origin, because they did not occur in the same ecoclimatic region as D. scalariella, because their entomological fauna was poorly known, and because they or related plants were known to be attacked by insects closely related to D. scalariella. The host restriction of the moth was confirmed as only boraginaceous plants were attacked. It was concluded that both in terms of effectiveness and specificity D. scalariella could serve as a biological control agent in Australia for E. plantagineum.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Xiaofang Sun

Native Americans’ cultural system has been utterly undermined in the early colonial conquest and the later neo-colonial expansion. Cultural annihilation is primarily caused by the forced cultural assimilation, especially by the white government’s practice of eradicating native traditions and beliefs. To rebuild the native culture system, Native American writer Linda Hogan attempts to employ the pre-colonial gynocratic principles in her literary creation, thus reterritorializing their cultural identity among the modern natives. This paper reveals how Hogan effectively resumes the ancient gynocratic principles by portraying a series of typical female images in the woman-centered native community, with an aim to fight against cultural assimilation guided by the white male-dominated western metaphysical epistemology.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (14) ◽  
pp. 56-68
Author(s):  
Matthew Gillispie

Since the time of the European colonialism and Manifest Destiny, all Native American (NA) communities have experienced intergenerational historical trauma stemming from past and current events. The resulting effects of historical trauma on individuals, families, and communities pass from generation to generation, and are hypothesized to be the cause of contemporary social, health, and educational disparities in NA communities. The author first provides an overview of historical trauma and persistent social, health, and educational disparities in NA communities today. This is followed with an introduction to culturally responsive instruction and services, and how this should be applied to NA children and communities. To conclude the article, readers are provided a description and key components of a university personnel preparation project, designed to recruit, educate, and empower future NA and non-NA speech-language pathologists (SLPs) with coursework and experiences related to culturally responsive early literacy instruction and services, as well as resources and examples for current educators and professionals.


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