Return of the Native: Some Reflexions on the History of American Indians

1974 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Bolt

Indian activists have recently complained about the pernicious attentions of white Indian ‘experts’, but they are likely to endure these attentions so long as their people retain a distinct cultural identity and national status. Unlike anthropologists and administrators, historians have not shaped the public policies applied to the native Americans, and so their expertise has seemed comparatively harmless. Yet having played a considerable part in misrepresenting the Indians, scholars have a duty to set the record straight with a minimum of unprofessional moralizing.

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Andréa Simoni Manarin Tunin ◽  
Fernando César Ferreira Gouvêa

This paper presents the Women Thousand Program as a policy of inclusion through education and jobs. It traces the history of public policies designed for women through the Thousand Women Program in the Brazil, and the women’s’ experiences at the Volta Redonda campus. The authors evaluate the public policies that include vulnerable women and efficiently assist them through school. Ethnographical methods were used, based on data obtained from participative observation and detailed monitoring of the daily life of the research participants. Through the lens of critical ethnography, which considers cultural, political, and economic factors, the results show a dissonance between the Thousand Women Program and the daily reality of its participants. In addition, the “salvationist” orientation of the school helps to perpetuate the exclusion of women and gender inequalities within Brazilian society.  


Urban Health ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 316-324
Author(s):  
Russ Lopez

Understanding the history of a place is essential for incorporating local concerns and values into decision-making. Most important, history is present whether we acknowledge it or not. Creating change and improving the lives and health of the public demands effective public policies. These policies must rest on the foundation of a city’s or neighborhood’s history. Channeling new development, preserving and protecting health, and meeting challenges posed by changing environmental conditions need the participation and support of thousands of people. These issues are never discussed in a vacuum, and no problems are solved without regard to history and memory. The Boston experience highlights the need for careful consideration of present conditions in order to prepare for the unknown future. This chapter discusses Boston as a case study, aiming to understand how history shapes cities and creates health in urban populations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 205979911772061
Author(s):  
Hannah Thurston

Like all museums, punishment museums and sites of penal tourism are inherently political and moral institutions, offering cultural memories of a collective past. As environments of narrativity, these are significant spaces in which the public ‘learn’ about the past and how it continues to inform the present. In line with recent studies about ‘dark’ tourist sites, this article argues that the crime/punishment museum and jail cell tour can – and should – be understood as an ethnographic opportunity for narrative analysis. Rather than focus on just the findings of such an analysis, this article seeks to provide a practical guide to data collection and analysis in the context of criminological museum research. Offering illustrative examples from a study of Texan sites of penal tourism, it demonstrates how the history of punishment – as represented in museums – is an important part of cultural identity more broadly, playing a significant role in how we conceptualise (in)justice, morality and the purpose of punishment. In short, this article discusses how we can evoke the ethnographic tradition within museum spaces in order to interrogate how crime and punishment are expressed through narratives, images, objects and symbols.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Felipe Fonseca

RESUMO A imagem de laboratório cidadão tem sido utilizada para descrever um campo vasto de iniciativas que de fato compartilham características organizacionais, de repertório, aspirações e metodologias. As mesmas iniciativas também guardam entre si, entretanto, uma considerável diversidade, como resultado de diferentes processos de formação e consolidação. Neste texto, retrato um histórico relativamente recente - de mais de uma década - de projetos brasileiros que atuam em campos costumeiramente associados ao cenário que hoje vem sendo identificado com os laboratórios cidadãos. Para oferecer este panorama, faço uma compilação breve de trabalhos anteriores nos quais tratei da cultura digital brasileira, de laboratórios experimentais e de arranjos criativos em rede, em particular do ponto de vista das políticas públicas engendradas pelo Ministério da Cultura do Brasil. Este histórico sugere que parte considerável das iniciativas que hoje articulam um discurso de inovação cidadã no Brasil de hoje está na verdade enraizada em contextos socioculturais diversos e mais antigos. Reconhecer e dar visibilidade a esta bagagem só tem a contribuir para a relevância e a efetividade dos projetos de inovação cidadã, contrabalançando a relativa novidade desta nomenclatura. Aproveito ainda para trazer à tona novamente algumas recomendações anteriormente dirigidas à elaboração de políticas públicas de estímulo ao campo dos laboratórios experimentais, mas que podem também contribuir para estruturar o eventual fomento à inovação cidadã.Palavras-chave: Laboratórios Experimentais; Inovação Cidadã; Políticas Públicas; Cultura Digital.ABSTRACT The image of a citizen lab has been used to describe a vast and varied field of iniatives which in fact share organizational characteristics, as well as repertories, aspirations and methodologies. The same initiatives also maintain, nonetheless, considerable diversity, as a result of different processes of formation and consolidation. This arcle portrays the relatively recent history – of more than a decade – of Brazilian projects active in fields customarily associated with the scenario now usually belonging to citizen labs. To explore this panorama, I propose a brief compilation of previous work where I wrote about Brazilian digital culture, experimental labs and creative network arrangements, particularly from the point of view of public policies emanating from the Ministry of Culture. This historical overview suggests that a considerable part of the initiatives that now adopt the language of citizen innovation in Brazil has its roots in diverse, and older, sociocultural contexts. Recognizing and pointing out this heritage contributes to the relevance and effectiveness of citizen innovation projects, countering the relative novelty of this nomenclature. The article also brings up some recommendations previously directed to the elaboration of public policies of stimulus to the field of experimental laboratories, but which may also contribute to build eventual support for citizen innovation.Keywords: Experimental Laboratories; Citizen Innovation; Public Policy; Digital Culture.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela R. RIley ◽  
Kristen Carpenter

In a number of recent controversies, from sports teams’ use of Indian mascots to the federal government’s desecration of sacred sites, American Indians have lodged charges of “cultural appropriation” or the unauthorized use by members of one group of the cultural expressions and resources of another. While these and other incidents make contemporary headlines, American Indians often experience these claims within a historical and continuing experience of dispossession. For hundreds of years, the U.S. legal system has sanctioned the taking and destruction of Indian lands, artifacts, bodies, religions, identities, and beliefs, all toward the project of conquest and colonization. Indian resources have been devalued by the law and made available for non-Indians to use for their own purposes. Seeking redresses for the losses caused by these actions, tribes have brought claims under a variety of laws, from trademark and copyright to the First Amendment and Fifth Amendment, and some have been more successful than others. As a matter of property law, courts have compensated—albeit incompletely—the taking of certain Indian lands and have also come to recognize tribal interests in human remains, gravesites, and associated artifacts. When it comes to intangible property, however, the situation is more complicated. It is difficult for legal decision makers and scholars alike to understand why Indian tribes should be able to regulate the use of Indian names, symbols, and expressions. Indeed, non-Indians often claim interests, sounding in free speech and the public domain, in the very same resources. To advance understanding of this contested area of law, this Article situates intangible cultural property claims in a larger history of the legal dispossession of Indian property—a phenomenon we call “Indian appropriation.” It then evaluates these claims vis-à-vis prevailing legal doctrine and offers a normative view of solutions, both legal and extralegal.Published: Angela R. Riley and Kristen A. Carpenter, "Owning Red: A Theory of Indian (Cultural) Appropriation," 94 Texas Law Review 859 (2016).


Author(s):  
Clarissa T. Kimber ◽  
Darrel McDonald

Peyote is one of the best-known plant sources for a psychedelic experience. This small cactus is also associated in the popular mind with North American Indians and Hippies. Although its ritual use is thought to be over 7,000 years old (Furst 1989, cited in Schaefer 1996: 141), its use by Indians of the Native American Church (NAC) is less than 100 years old. The peyote button is the essential ingredient in the ritual ceremony associated with NAC meetings and is referred to as “the medicine” by those who regard the button as a god-being and ingest it as a sacrament (Slotkin 1956: 29; Smith and Snake 1996: 80, 91, 105–6). Even more recently, non-Indians have formed churches (the Neo American Church) to follow the Peyote Way or Road (Trout 1999: 47). Secular uses of peyote are as medicine, especially for topical application to the skin on open wounds (Schultes 1940), for divination to discover something lost or when possible attacks of the enemy will occur; or for mind-altering experiences of a nonreligious nature, that is, for recreation. These nonritual (profane) uses have a long history, but peyote’s more significant sacred use in the United States, as measured by numbers of participants, has been in force for little more than 100 years. Various plants are called peyote in Mexico (Schultes 1938: 157), and their usage in the public and official literature of Texas and the United States has not been precise over the years (Morgan 1976: 12, La Barre 1975: 14–17). The major confusion over the common name among field anthropologists and government officials has been with the mescal bean, or Texas mountain laurel [Sophora secundiflora (Ort.) DC]. This hardy, small tree produces a hard, highly toxic, red seed, which has had a long history of ritual use by Amerinds (La Barre 1975: 15). The distribution of the mescal bean is on the southern edge of the Edwards Plateau, on the caliche cuestas in the Rio Grande Plains, and in the mountains of the Trans-Pecos. The native Americans of this region strung the beans into necklaces or bracelets, and a shaman might have passed down to another shaman some of these items as important paraphernalia.


2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 459-464
Author(s):  
MEREDITH OYEN

In the fall of 2015, a great debate began taking shape internationally and in the United States over how to reconcile foreign-policy interests, national security concerns, and a response to a profound refugee crisis emerging in Europe as a result of the conflict in Syria. World leaders vacillated, demagogues pontificated, and social media memes employed bad historical analogies to shame fellow citizens into action. Despite the sudden urgency, the arguments blasting from twenty-four-hour news stations and ill-drawn cartoons depicting seventeenth-century pilgrims as forlorn refugees given safe harbor by Native Americans at Plymouth Rock did not represent a new line of thinking in the longer history of international migration management. The public is once again debating how to balance humanitarianism against fear, and which sentiment should play the greater role in governing the decision to admit new migrants. As the papers in this forum ably show, policies, procedures, and perspectives on migration have always had an international-relations component that can trump the local concerns that often dominate domestic debates.


Author(s):  
Federico VAZ ◽  
Sharon PRENDEVILLE

Described as units developing public policies in a design-oriented manner, Policy Labs are tasked to innovate to gain in policy effectiveness and efficiency. However, as public policymaking is a context-dependent activity, the way in which these novel organisations operate significantly differs. This study discusses the emergence of design approaches for policy innovation. The purpose is to map how Policy Labs in Europe introduce design approaches at distinct stages of the policymaking cycle. For this study, 30 organisations in Europe operating at various levels of government were surveyed. Based on the public policymaking process model, it investigates which design methods are Policy Labs deploying to innovate public policies. The study exposed a gap in the awareness of the utilised methods' nature. It also showed that the use of design methods is of less importance than the introduction of design mindsets for public policy innovation, namely ‘user-centredness’, ‘co-creation’, and ‘exploration’.


Migration and Modernities recovers a comparative literary history of migration by bringing together scholars from the US and Europe to explore the connections between migrant experiences and the uneven emergence of modernity. The collection initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demonstrating how mobility unsettles the geographic boundaries, temporal periodization, and racial categories we often use to organize literary and historical study. Migrants are by definition liminal, and many have existed historically in the spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities. In exploring these spaces, Migration and Modernities also investigates the origins of current debates about belonging, rights, and citizenship. Its chapters traverse the globe, revealing the experiences — real or imagined — of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. They explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others. These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.


Author(s):  
Jovo Lojanica ◽  

All management standards have requirements for different aspects of improvements on the personal level, family level, company level, in business and life. What is about national level and country level? Is it possible for today’s generations to learn history of nations and of civilizations? If it is — ok, let’s apply it on actual time and people to have less problems and difficulties — especially if is actual in field of risk management. Majority of people are occupied by today’s problems. They don’t consider past and future challenges. People from each country strive for better quality, better and cleaner environment, higher safety etc. historically and today. But could we remember: How did Genghis Khan conquer many regions and how was he defeated? How did Mayas and Aztecs die out? How were Native Americans in North America drastically reduced in numbers? How did the Roman Imperium vanish? How was the Ottoman Imperium established and how it vanished? How many people were killed in the wars in XX century, etc? In all these catastrophic changes risks were not considered in an adequate way. Requirements of risk management — Principles and guidelines — ISO 31000:2009 are very consultative. They could be used on country level, national level, regional level, continental and intercontinental level.


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