scholarly journals A Language Fair, a Community and a Museum

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-70
Author(s):  
Daniel C. Swan ◽  
Mary S. Linn
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Institutional Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Native American Youth ◽  
Successful Program ◽  
History Of ◽  
Native American Language ◽  
Youth Language ◽  
Museum Practice

Founded in 2003 the Oklahoma Native American Youth Language Fair (ONAYLF) has become one of the largest gatherings of Native American language learners in the United States. The Fair is unquestionably the most significant and sustained interaction with Native American communities in the history of the Sam Noble Museum, quickly becoming a signature event that contributes to the museum’s reputation and stature. As the Fair gained increased prominence and importance in the Native American communities of Oklahoma and the surrounding regions it was consistently marginalized within the institutional culture of the museum. Over the course of our respective leadership of the ONAYLF we encountered the continued need for anthropological intervention to “re-institutionalize” a very successful program. In this report we focus on specific impacts of this failed ownership and the anthropological methods employed to address them. We conclude with an assessment of the ONAYLF in terms of on-going efforts to decolonize museum practice.

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.

THE RACIAL HISTORY OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN AMERICA

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 221-241
Author(s):  
Heather Ann Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Incarceration Rate ◽  
Racial History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law

AbstractThe United States today has the highest incarceration rate, as well as the largest number of people living under correctional control more broadly (including probation and parole), than any other country on the globe. The size of the American criminal justice system is not only internationally unparalleled, but it is also historically unprecedented. This apparatus is also deeply racialized. African Americans, Latinos, and indigenous populations (Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, Native American), are all represented in U. S. jails and prisons in numbers dramatically disproportionate to their representation in the population as a whole, and every non-White population is incarcerated at a rate far surpassing that of Whites. Notably, however, while the scale of today’s criminal justice system is unsurpassed and unprecedented, its severe racial disproportionality has always been a defining feature. Only by taking a close look at the long and deeply racialized history of the American criminal justice system, and more specifically at the regularly discriminatory application of the law as well as the consistent lack of equal justice under the law over time, can we fully understand not only why the American criminal justice system remains so unjust, but also why prison populations rose so dramatically when they did.

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 Archaeology, the Caddo Indian Tribe, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary C. Carter
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Congress ◽  
Trading Posts ◽  
Indian Tribe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Southern Branch ◽  
Foreign Governments ◽  
The Right ◽  
Do So

Caddo leadership has a long history of working cooperatively with foreign governments. In the seventeenth century, they cooperated with Spanish officials and missionaries who wanted to establish themselves among the southern branch of Caddo tribes--the Hasinai in Northeast Texas. In the eighteenth century, they cooperated with the French who wanted to establish trading posts on the Red River among the Natchitoches and Kadohadacho. In the nineteenth century they cooperated with Americans to establish peaceful relationships with unfriendly tribe. For Caddos, the result of these cooperative efforts was disillusion, decimation, displacement, and finally dispossession. Now, with new hope in the twentieth century, Caddo leaders have again pledged cooperation. This time with agencies, institutions, and individuals affected by an act of the United States Congress: the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). They do so with a desire to reach mutually satisfactory agreements for the return of some part of what was lost in previous time: respect for their dead and recognition that only living descendants have the right to possess cultural items that belonged to Caddo ancestors.

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.

California

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Bauer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
The United States ◽  
California Indians ◽  
Migrant Laborers ◽  
Indigenous Nations ◽  
Economic Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Politically Active

This chapter reviews the economic, cultural, and political history of California’s Native American communities. Throughout the twentieth century, scholars considered California Indians to be the United States’ most primitive indigenous people. Yet today, they are among the country’s most economically and politically active indigenous nations. This chapter explains how this economic and political activism is a product of a long history of adapting to changing circumstances. Before the arrival of Europeans, California Indians altered economic practices because of environmental change. Beginning in 1769, California Indians adjusted to the presence of Spanish colonists by using the missions to bolster their economies. In the 1830s and 1840s, California Indians raided Mexican ranchos for horses, which they exchanged with fur traders. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, California Indians worked as migrant laborers in the state’s agribusiness, and today operate some of the most successful gaming resorts in the United States.

These People Have Always Been a Republic

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurice S. Crandall
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Economic

Spanning three hundred years and the colonial regimes of Spain, Mexico, and the United States, Maurice S. Crandall’s sweeping history of Native American political rights in what is now New Mexico, Arizona, and Sonora demonstrates how Indigenous communities implemented, subverted, rejected, and indigenized colonial ideologies of democracy, both to accommodate and to oppose colonial power.  Focusing on four groups--Pueblos in New Mexico, Hopis in northern Arizona, and Tohono O'odhams and Yaquis in Arizona/Sonora--Crandall reveals the ways Indigenous peoples absorbed and adapted colonially imposed forms of politics to exercise sovereignty based on localized political, economic, and social needs. Using sources that include oral histories and multinational archives, this book allows us to compare Spanish, Mexican, and American conceptions of Indian citizenship, and adds to our understanding of the centuries-long struggle of Indigenous groups to assert their sovereignty in the face of settler colonial rule.

Indian Territory and Oklahoma

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Troy Smith
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Tribal Sovereignty ◽  
Indian Territory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Tribes ◽  
Rich History ◽  
Do So

In the nineteenth century, the United States relocated thousands of indigenous peoples from their homelands east of the Mississippi River to Indian Territory, an area that would later be known as Oklahoma. The region was not uninhabited, however; it already had a rich history of Native groups stretching back for millennia, and it had long been a nexus for trade and empire. New and original inhabitants alike would endeavor to maintain homes and tribal sovereignty up to the formation of the state of Oklahoma and the dissolution of Indian Territory, and they continue to do so into the twenty-first century, when Oklahoma is home to thirty-eight federally recognized American Indian tribes and has the second-highest Native American population in the country

The Ponca Tribe of Nebraska: The Process of Restoration of a Federally Terminated Tribe

1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Grobsmith ◽  
Beth Ritter
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
General Welfare ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
Native American Tribes ◽  
Government Data

The Northern Ponca, a small Plains farming and hunting tribe were legislatively terminated as a federally recognized tribe in 1962. Less than a decade after their termination, they reorganized in an attempt to reverse this decision, and proceeded with legal action to restore their status as a federally recognized tribe. During the 30-year period during which their federal status was lost, their population dispersed, their economic status, health, and general welfare declined, and their ability to practice their culture diminished. This article documents their efforts to restore their federally recognized tribal status, which would enable them to resume eligibility for services to which other Native American tribes are entitled. Following a review of aboriginal Ponca culture and the history of their relations with the United States government, data on the contemporary Northern Ponca are presented. The complex process of achieving restoration is outlined, from the formation of a non-profit tribal corporation to the development of the Ponca Restoration Act. The authors have served, as consultants to and witnesses for the tribe and assisted in preparation of materials for use by the federal government. The Ponca Restoration Act was signed by President Bush on October 31, 1990.

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