Native American Networks

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Cultural Beliefs ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Native North America

Networks describe how people and places are connected. In Native North America, these connections took the form of kinship, trade, and various forms of alliance—all of which overlapped in ways that make it impossible to analyze one category without considering the others. At a basic level, all of these networks depended on the communication of information, which circulated as fact and rumor across the continent. Varying by region and topography, Native peoples traveled by canoe, foot, and (from the colonial period onward) horseback along trail networks that linked diverse Native American towns and facilitated both continental and transatlantic trade and communication. The study of networks, whether in the form of trade, kinship, or Native-defined alliances, allows historians to transcend typical boundaries of analysis, such as borders drawn by European cartographers. Throughout the 18th century and even into the 19th century, these borders were fictions, as Native Americans continued to control much of the continent. An abundance of archaeological evidence reveals the exchange networks that spread material items and cultural beliefs long before the colonial period. Some of the most well-known pre-Columbian networks involved agriculturalist settlements often grouped under the label “Mississippian,” which thrived along the Mississippi and its tributaries from approximately the 11th through 16th centuries. But other networks crisscrossed the continent, from the Great Plains to the Southwest. These long-existing but shifting networks facilitated the later spread of European trade goods. To varying degrees, following the arrival of Europeans, Native peoples participated in a new system of exchange, capitalism, which commodified the natural world and has drawn considerable attention from scholars. Political power in Native North America was dynamic, organized by kinship networks that were both local and regional in importance. Families belonged to larger groups known as clans, which facilitated connections beyond the village. Typically, Native peoples traced these clan origins to some other-than-human ancestor. Kinship did not necessarily represent biological connections. Through ceremonies, Native peoples created what scholars call “fictive kinship” to create networks across distances and even into Euro-American communities.

Native American Ethnicity: a View from the British Museum1

2000 ◽  
Vol 73 (182) ◽  
pp. 221-238
Author(s):  
J. C. H. King
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Native Identity ◽  
Native North America ◽  
American Ethnicity

Abstract Identity in Native North America is defined by legal, racial, linguistic and ethnic traits. This article looks at the nomenclature of both Indian, Eskimo and Native, and then places them in a historical context, in Canada and the United States. It is argued that ideas about Native Americans derive from medieval concepts, and that these ideas both constrain Native identity and ensure the survival of American Indians despite accelerating loss of language.

Bears

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
North America ◽  
Special Treatment ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
Economic Significance ◽  
Northern Latitudes ◽  
Comparative Ethnography ◽  
Native North America

Thanks to Irving Hallowell’s classic 1926 comparative ethnography on the special mythic status of bears in Subarctic cultures, anthropologists are generally aware that peoples throughout the northern hemisphere have treated bears as far more than a subsistence resource, something more akin to another kind of human or, to use Hallowell’s famous phrase, “other-than-human persons.” While Hallowell provided ample evidence of bear ceremonialism in northern latitudes, he found little evidence for the special treatment of bears elsewhere in Native North America. Archaeological and historical research over the last nine decades, however, has produced vast unsynthesized information about the roles of bears in Native American beliefs, rituals, and subsistence. This book is the first collective effort since Hallowell’s formative publication to consider how Native peoples viewed, treated, and used black bears (Ursus americanus) through time across Eastern North America. Contributors draw on zooarchaeological, ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and other evidence of bear hunting, consumption, and use, while contemplating the range of relationships that existed between bears and humans. They have reviewed thousands of pages of ethnohistorical and ethnographic documents and summarized and interpreted data on bear remains from nearly 300 archaeological sites from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico. Native peoples perceived and related to bears in remarkably diverse ways. Our authors explore the religious and economic significance of bears and bear products (meat, fat, oil, pelts, etc.), bear imagery in Native art and artifacts, and bears in Native worldviews, kinship systems, and cosmologies, along with their role as exported commodities in trans-Atlantic trade.

scholarly journals Antiquities of the Copper Region of the North American Lakes

1858 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 203-212
Author(s):  
Daniel Wilson ◽  
Robert Chambers
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Great Lakes ◽  
North American ◽  
American History ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Copper Deposits ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
The North

The author, having visited North America, describes the copper deposits found on the shores of the Great Lakes and the techniques used by the native peoples of these regions to work this metal into tools and weaponry. He also discusses the discovery of tropical conch shells in this area and the burial practices of some of the native peoples. It is noted that the native Americans hammered the copper into shape while it was cold as they did not use smelting. He concludes by contrasting the geographical factors that he believes affected European and North American history and making some generalisations about the racial characteristics of European and native American peoples.

The Effect of Cultural Beliefs on the Treatment of Native Peoples with Diabetes and Visual Impairment

1993 ◽  
Vol 87 (9) ◽  
pp. 333-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.V. Ponchillia
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Visual Impairment ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Vision Loss ◽  
Cultural Beliefs ◽  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Native American Culture ◽  
Provision Of Services

An increase in the incidence of diabetes among Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Pacific Islanders is leading to a modern epidemic of diabetes and its complications. Traditional cultural beliefs can affect the success of services to native peoples who are experiencing vision loss. This article discusses these cultural beliefs, with illustrations from Native American culture, and the implications for the provision of services.

Archaeologies of Persistence: Reconsidering the Legacies of Colonialism in Native North America

2013 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee M. Panich
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
North America ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Archaeology Of Colonialism ◽  
Native North America ◽  
Cultural Extinction ◽  
Descendant Communities

AbstractThis article seeks to define common ground from which to build a more integrated approach to the persistence of indigenous societies in North America. Three concepts are discussed—identity, practice, and context—that may prove useful for the development of archaeologies of persistence by allowing us to counter terminal narratives and essentialist concepts of cultural identity that are deeply ingrained in scholarly and popular thinking about Native American societies. The use of these concepts is illustrated in an example that shows how current archaeological research is challenging long-held scholarty and popular beliefs about the effects of colonialism in coastal California, where the policies of Spanish colonial missionaries have long been thought to have driven local native peoples to cultural extinction. By exploring how the sometimes dramatic changes of the colonial period were internally structured and are just one part of long and dynamic native histories, archaeologies of persistence may help to bring about a shift in how the archaeology of colonialism presents the histories of native peoples in North America—one that can make archaeology more relevant to descendant communities.

scholarly journals Whose North America is it? “Nobody owns it. It owns itself.”

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-164
Author(s):  
Margaret Connell-Szasz
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Sonoran Desert ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Land Ownership ◽  
Tohono O'odham ◽  
Spiritual Community ◽  
European Immigrants ◽  
Us Constitution

Responding to the question, “Whose North America is it?,” this essay argues North America does not belong to anyone. As a Sonoran Desert Tohono O’odham said of the mountain: “Nobody owns it. It owns itself.” Contrasting Native American and Euro-American views of the natural world, the essay maintains that European immigrants introduced the startling concept of Cartesian duality. Accepting a division between spiritual and material, they viewed the natural world as physical matter, devoid of spirituality. North America’s First People saw it differently: they perceived the Earth/Universe as a spiritual community of reciprocal relationships bound by intricate ties of kinship and respect. This clash has shaped American history. From the sixteenth century forward, many European immigrants envisioned land ownership as a dream. Creators of the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution thrust “happiness”/“property” into the nation’s mythology. Southern Euro-Americans claimed “ownership” of African Americans, defining them as “property”; Native Americans resisted Euro-Americans’ enforcement of land ownership ideology; by the late 1800s, Euro-Americans’ view of the natural world as physical matter spurred massive extraction of natural resources. The Cartesian duality persisted, but, given its dubious legacy, Native Americans question the wisdom of this interpretation of the natural world.

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.

Wired into Nature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Schwoch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Communication Networks ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Electronic Communication ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
White House ◽  
Atlantic Seaboard

This book is a study of the telegraph in western North America, concentrating on the latter half of the nineteenth century. A number of distinguished books and articles have been written about the telegraph and the nineteenth-century American experience. For the most part, however, this scholarly work is geographically partial. The standard histories of the American telegraph are stories of the East Coast and the Atlantic Seaboard, the growing Midwest, and service to urban areas. This book looks toward the West. The narrative includes landscapes and ecosystems, meteorology, surveillance, and containment and conflict with Native Americans. Major themes include the high ground, the signal flow, the state secret, and the secure command. Opening with discussion of the first attempts to bring the telegraph to the Trans-Mississippi West, the book concludes with the consolidation of the secure command of electronic communication networks in the White House during the Spanish-American War, detailing the transformation of electronic communication networks from continentalism to globalism. The terrain of the narrative incudes the Great Plains, the Southwest, the Pacific Coast, the Rocky Mountains, the border with Mexico, and the subarctic and arctic areas of North America. This book presents an interpretive approach that centers on environmental, climatological, military, and surveillance issues as key factors in the history of electronic communication networks.

Moravians

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Spencer Fogleman
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Mass Movement ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
British North America ◽  
New Community

The Moravians were a mostly German Pietist religious group that spread throughout the Atlantic world and beyond in the 18th century. Though considered “Protestant,” their origins predate the Reformation. In the late 14th century, a grassroots religious renewal movement began in Bohemia and Moravia that gained momentum after the martyrdom of its two most important leaders, Jan Hus (b. c. 1369–d. 1415) and Jerome of Prague (b. 1379–d. 1416). Thereafter, a mass movement developed that armed itself and successfully fought off numerous crusades by forces of the Holy Roman Empire bent on its destruction. After a settlement that secured its existence, a branch of this “Hussite” movement became pacifist and called itself the Unitas Fratrum, a name the Moravians carry to this day. Victorious imperial Catholic forces destroyed them and other “Protestants” in Bohemia and Moravia during the Thirty Years’ War, forcing them to go underground. In 1722 a remnant of the old Unitas Fratrum from Moravia settled on the estates of Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760) in Upper Lusatia (Saxony). They began building a new community called Herrnhut, with Zinzendorf as their leader, and in 1728 the Unitas Fratrum formally celebrated its rebirth. Under Zinzendorf’s direction, the movement expanded rapidly in the mid-18th century and developed a rigorous mission program that continues to this day. The Moravians promoted ecumenism in a confessional age, which led to their involvement with Lutheran, Calvinist, and other churches in often controversial ways. They are important to Atlantic history because they engaged with Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans in significant ways throughout the Atlantic world, and they kept detailed records of their activities. Many of their early missionary efforts failed, but they became noted for their successes, especially among slaves on St. Thomas, St. Croix, and elsewhere in the Caribbean; the Mahicans, Delawares, and Shawnees in British North America; Maroons and later slaves in Suriname; and Inuits in Greenland. They also had significant short-term successes among the Arawaks in Berbice and Cherokees in northern Georgia. Suriname became a long-term success story in the 19th century, and in the late 19th and 20th centuries, Moravians had tremendous success in Africa. Today, the largest numbers of Moravians are in Africa and North America, not Europe. It is their mission successes in so many places, combined with their disassociation from European imperial projects, their record keeping, and their cosmopolitan Weltanschauung, that make them such an important people to the study of Atlantic history, especially for historians who wish to cross imperial boundaries and study encounters among all peoples in the region.

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