Native Americans, Law, and Religion in America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Guéno
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Christian Missions ◽  
American Values ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Religion was a point of cultural conflict, political motivation, and legal justification throughout the European and American colonization of North America. Beginning in the 14th century, Catholic monarchs invoked Christian doctrine and papal law to claim Native American “heathenry” or “infidelity” as legal grounds that legitimized or mandated their policies of military invasion and territorial occupation. More progressive Christian thinkers argued for the recognition of Native Americans as human beings entitled to certain natural-law protections that morally obligated Spain to conquer and convert them for their own benefit. Spain and France worked with the church throughout the 16th and 17th centuries to establish missions throughout seized Native American territories, while English colonists often segregated Native Americans into “praying towns” for their moral benefit or the sanctity of the colonies. After the United States declared independence, American politicians quickly identified dissolution of Native American cultures as a necessary step in undermining tribal saliency and in ensuring the political dominion of state and federal governments. By the 19th century, policymakers were convinced that encouraging Indians to put aside their “savage ways” would help tribal populations achieve cultural and spiritual salvation through Christianity. In 1869, President Grant initiated a “Peace Policy” that granted Christian missions contracts and federal funding to civilize and Christianize the Native American peoples of assigned reservations. The federal government established boarding schools for the children of tribal communities to teach English, Christianity, and occupational skills in order to “Kill the Indian in him and Save the Man.” During the 19th and 20th centuries, federal legislation stripped Native Americans of lands, property, and rights, while federal agencies forbade the practice of indigenous Native American religions. Subsequent courts legitimated the historic claim of European nations to Native American lands pursuant to the “Doctrine of Discovery,” thus ruling these policies either legal or unreviewable. While judicial decisions throughout the 20th century also recognized tribal rights to land, water, and self-government as well as the legal obligation of the federal government to protect tribal resources, these rulings have been inconsistently realized. Throughout the history of the United States, law has articulated, in the language of privilege, right, and moral prescription, American values and visions of ideal relations. As American culture has changed, federal policy has swung back and forth among initiatives to relocate, terminate, assimilate, and appropriate Native American cultures. Religion and law have advanced agendas of conquest and colonization and become means by which Native Americans peoples have resisted those agendas.

Kenrick and the Paulists: A Conflict of Structures and Personalities

1969 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-105
Author(s):  
John P. Marschall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The United States ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Religious Congregation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Catholic Church

In spite of the nativism that agitated the United States during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church experienced a noticeable drift of native American converts from other denominations. Between 1841 and 1857 the increased number of converts included a significant sprinkling of Protestant ministers. The history of this movement, which had its paradigm in the Oxford Movement, will be treated more in detail elsewhere. The purpose of this essay is simply to recount the attempt by several converts to establish a religious congregation of men dedicated to the Catholic apostolate among native Americans.

scholarly journals Le Postmoderne et la « Visibilite » des « Invisibles » : Cas des « Native Americans » dans « This Land » de Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (42) ◽  
pp. 100
Author(s):  
Zouankouan Stéphane Beugre
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
American History ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right

Cet article vise à montrer comment dans la philosophie postmoderne et avec le postmoderne, les « native americans » qui étaient « invisibles » dans la période de l’Eurocentrisme sont passés d’une « invisibilité » à une visibilité véritable. Puisque désormais ils ont droit à la parole et donc ils disent leur part de vérité sur l’histoire des États-Unis et sur leurs propres histoires à eux telle que vécues avec les euro-américains. A travers donc les théories de la déconstruction et de l’historicisme, l’étude a fait remarquer que les « native americans » ont une visibilité dans le monde postmoderne et plus précisément aux États-Unis à travers une visibilité liée à la réclamation de leurs terres, à travers une visibilité liée à la réécriture de l’histoire américaine, d’une part à enseigner sur eux et d’autre part à enseigner sur l’origine des États-Unis ; et enfin à travers une visibilité liée à la restauration et la restitution de leur héritage culturel, cet héritage culturel que les survivants des génocides possèdent et font rayonné. Il faut par ailleurs ajouter que ce passage du statut d’invisibles à la visibilité à trois niveaux (réclamation de leurs terres, réécriture de l’histoire américaine, restauration et restitution de leur héritage culturel) marque un tournant décisif dans la vie des États-Unis et c’est à juste titre que Joe Biden, le Président américain a choisi novembre 2021 pour célébrer l’héritage des «Native Americans».   This article aims to show how in postmodern philosophy and with the postmodern, "native americans" who were "invisible" in the period of Eurocentrism went from "invisibility" to true visibility. Since now they have the right to speak and therefore they can tell their share of the truth about the history of the United States and their own stories as they used to live them since their contact with Euro-Americans. So through the theories of deconstruction and historicism, this study pointed out that “native americans” have visibility in the postmodern world and more precisely in the contemporary United States through a visibility linked to the claim of their lands, through a visibility linked to the rewriting of American history, on the one hand that taught about them and on the other hand that taught about the origin of the United States; and finally through a visibility linked to the restoration and restitution of their cultural heritage, this cultural heritage that the survivors of genocides possess and promote proudly. It should also be added that this passage from the status of invisibility to visibility at three levels (claim of their lands, rewriting of American history, restoration and restitution of their cultural heritage) indicates a decisive turning point in the history of the United States and it is with good reason that Joe Biden, the American President, declared November 2021 to celebrate Native American Heritage.

Sacred and Profane Uses of the Cactus Lophophora Williamsii from the South Texas Peyote Gardens

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clarissa T. Kimber ◽  
Darrel McDonald
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
American Indians ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Texas ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
North American Indians ◽  
Native American Church ◽  
History Of

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.

scholarly journals Mapping a Nation: Daniel Carter Beard’s Time as a Surveyor for the Sanborn Map Company

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
John J. Swab
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Urban America ◽  
Fire Insurance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The City ◽  
Eastern Half

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Fire insurance maps produced by the American firm the Sanborn Map Company have long served as cartographic guides to understanding the history of urban America. Primarily used by cultural and historical geographers, historians, historic preservationists, and environmental consultants; historians of cartography have little explored the history of this company. While this scholarship has addressed various facets of Sanborn’s history (Ristow, 1968), no scholarly piece has explored the lived experience of being a Sanborn surveyor. This lack of scholarship comes not from any significant oversight but rather from the fact that the contributions of most Sanborn surveyors were anonymous and little recorded on the maps themselves. Moreover, the company itself has done little to save its own history, thus little is known of their individual stories and experiences. The exception to this is perhaps the most famous Sanborn surveyor of all: Daniel Carter Beard.</p><p>Over the course of his nine-decade life, Daniel Carter Beard held several prominent positions including the co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America and the lead illustrator for many of Mark Twain’s novels. However, he got his start as a surveyor for the Sanborn Map Company in the 1870s, just a few years after its founding. His papers, housed at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, includes a variety of ephemera from his time with the Sanborn Map Company.</p><p>Trained in civil engineering, Beard got his start as a surveyor for the Cincinnati (Ohio) Office of Platting Commission, creating the first official plat map for the city. He was hired by Sanborn in 1874 and served as a surveyor until 1878, traveling extensively over the eastern half of the United States, parlaying his skills into creating fire insurance maps for Sanborn. Thus, this paper speaks to two main themes. The first theme traces the route of Beard during his early years with the company across the eastern half of the United States, documenting both the places he visited and the challenges he faced as a Sanborn surveyor. The second theme, interwoven through the paper, is an analysis of the innerworkings of Sanborn’s administrative structure and its relationship with the larger fire insurance market during the 1870s. Altogether, these documents present unique insight into the organization of the Sanborn Map Company and how it produced its maps during the second-half of the 19th century.</p>

The Feminization of Etiquette Literature: Foucault, Mechanisms of Social Change, and the Paradoxes of Empowerment

1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Arditi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Change ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Space ◽  
The 19Th Century

This paper explores the opening of a discursive space within the etiquette literature in the United States during the 19th century and how women used this space as a vehicle of empowerment. It identifies two major strategies of empowerment. First, the use or appropriation of existing discourses that can help redefine the “other” within an hegemonic space. Second, and more importantly, the transformation of that space in shifting the lines by which differentiation is produced to begin with. Admittedly, these strategies are neither unique nor the most important in the history of women's empowerment. But this paper argues that the new discourses formulated by women helped forge a new space within which women ceased being the “other,” and helped give body to a concept of womanhood as defined by a group of women, regardless of how idiosyncratic that group might have been.

Intolerance toward Native American Religions

2020 ◽  
pp. 125-146
Author(s):  
John Corrigan ◽  
Lynn S. Neal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Native American Religions

Settler colonialism was imbued with intolerance towards Indigenous peoples. In colonial North America brutal military force was applied to the subjection and conversion of Native Americans to Christianity. In the United States, that offense continued, joined with condemnations of Indian religious practice as savagery, or as no religion at all. The violence was legitimated by appeals to Christian scripture in which genocide was commanded by God. Forced conversion to Christianity and the outlawing of Native religious practices were central aspects of white intolerance.

Ethnohistory and Historical Ethnography

Anthropology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bronwen Douglas ◽  
Dario Di Rosa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
The United States ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Land Claims ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Historical Ethnography ◽  
History Of

This article situates ethnohistory historically, conceptually, methodologically, and geographically in relation to its intertwined “parent” disciplines of anthropology and history. As a named interdisciplinary inquiry, ethnohistory emerged in the United States in the mid-1950s in the “applied” context of academic involvement in Native American land claims hearings after 1946. However, anthropology (the science of humanity) has overlapped, intersected, or diverged from history (study or knowledge of the past) since becoming a distinct field in Europe in the mid-18th century and gradually professionalized as an academic discipline from the 1830s, initially in Russia (see Before Boas: The genesis of ethnography and ethnology in the German Enlightenment [Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2015], cited under Anthropology and History). Anthropological approaches oscillated between historicization and its neglect or denial, with recurring tension between event and system, process and structure, diachrony and synchrony. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, ethnology (comparative study of peoples or races, their origins and development) was distinguished from the natural history of man and from anthropology (the science of race), initially in France. From the 1860s to the 1920s, Anglophone anthropological theory was dominated by the opposed doctrines of sociocultural evolution and diffusion—both superficially historical but largely ahistorical processes. For the next half century, prevailing functionalist, structuralist, and culturalist discourses mostly denied knowable history to ethnography’s purportedly vanishing “primitive” subjects. This uneven, agonistic disciplinary history did not encourage a subfield uniting anthropology and history. However, after 1950, in global contexts of anticolonialism, decolonization, and movements for Indigenous or egalitarian rights, anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists developed the hybrid fields of Ethnohistory and Ethnographic History, which flourished for half a century. Practitioners transcended ethnohistory’s spatial and conceptual roots in the United States and Canada to investigate Indigenous or African American pasts in Latin America and the Caribbean, Indigenous or local pasts in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, and non-Indigenous pasts in Europe and elsewhere. The need to incorporate Indigenous or popular histories and viewpoints was increasingly emphasized. From the 1980s, ethnohistory was condemned as Eurocentric, outdated, even racist, by postcolonial and postmodern critiques (see: The state of ethnohistory. Annual Review of Anthropology 20 (1991):345–375, cited under General Overviews). The label’s usage declined in the 21st century in favor of the already established terms anthropological history or historical anthropology, or the emergent fields of Anthropology of History, historical consciousness, and historicity.

History of Testing in the United States: PK–12 Education

2019 ◽  
Vol 683 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maris A. Vinovskis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
No Child Left Behind ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Education ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
K 12

This article provides a brief history of K–12 education testing in the United States from colonial America to the present. In early America, students were examined orally. After the mid-nineteenth century, written tests replaced oral presentations. In the late nineteenth century, graded schools gradually replaced the single-teacher, one-room schools. In the beginning of the twentieth century, standardized intelligence tests were increasingly used to categorize and promote students. State departments of education have played a larger role in local school funding and policies in the past hundred years. Since the 1960s, the federal government has expanded its involvement in national education while also promoting the role of states. During the past three decades, the federal government and states increased the use of high-stakes national testing with initiatives such as America 2000, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and Every Student Succeeds.

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