scholarly journals Spiritual and religious aspects of torture and scalping among the Indian cultures in Eastern North America, from ancient to colonial times

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 115-128
Author(s):  
Juha Hiltunen
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
American People ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The North ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Religious Aspects

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.

Nature and Religion in America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett Grainger
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Language ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
North American Continent ◽  
The North ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Complex Words

One of the most complex words in the English language, “nature” (sometimes personified as “Nature” or “Mother Nature”) has been central to developments in American religions. Despite their different origins, the three cosmologies present on the North American continent during the early modern “age of contact”—Native American, African American, and Euro-American—shared a number of similarities, including the belief in an enchanted or animate cosmos, the ambivalence of sacred presences manifested in nature, and the use of myth and ritual to manage these ambivalent presences in ways that secured material and spiritual benefits for individuals or communities. Through encounters on colonial borderlands and through developments in society and culture (in science, economics, politics, etc.), these cosmologies have been adapted, developed, and combined in creative ways to produce new forms of religious life. These developments have been characterized by a series of recurrent tensions, including the notion of divine or spiritual realities as being transcendent or immanent, organicism or mechanism, and of the natural world as including or excluding human beings. Organicist and animist cosmologies, severely challenged by the early modern scientific revolution, were resurgent in the antebellum period, fueling a series of new religious developments, from Transcendentalism and revivalism to Mormonism and the early environmentalist movement. These generative tensions continue to reverberate into the modern day, in part as an outworking of the environmental crisis of the 1960s, which saw a purported “greening” of established religions as well as the rise of new forms of nature spirituality.

scholarly journals Uncovering Indigenous Worlds and Histories on a Bend of a New England River before the 1650s: Problematizing Nomenclature and Settler Colonial History, Deep History, and Early Colonization Narratives

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Strobel ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Praying Town

The essay explores the often-ignored histories of the indigenous people who resided on the confluence of the Merrimack and the Concord rivers up to the 1650s. This place is characterized by a significant bend in the Merrimack River as it changes its southerly flow into an easterly direction. Today, the area includes the modern city of Lowell, Massachusetts, and its surroundings. While the 1650s saw the creation of a Native American “praying town” and the incorporation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s towns of Chelmsford and Billerica, it is the diverse and complex indigenous past before this decade which North American and global historians tend to neglect. The pre-colonial and early colonial eras, and how observers have described these periods, have shaped the way we understand history today. This essay problematizes terminology, looks at how amateur historians of the 19th and early 20th centuries have shaped popular perceptions of Native Americans, and explores how researchers have told the history before the 1650s. The materials available to reconstruct the history of the region’s Native Americans are often hard to find, a common issue for researchers who attempt to study the history of indigenous peoples before 1500. Thus, the essay pays special attention to how incomplete primary sources as well as archeological and ethnohistorical evidence have shaped interpretations of this history and how these intellectual processes have aided in the construction of this past.

Native Americans and the Third World Strike at UC Berkeley

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-39
Author(s):  
LaNada War Jack
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Third World ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The University

The author reflects on her personal experience as a Native American at UC Berkeley in the 1960s as well as on her activism and important leadership roles in the 1969 Third World Liberation Front student strike, which had as its goal the creation of an interdisciplinary Third World College at the university.

Algonquian Diasporas

Memory Lands ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine M. DeLucia
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Community Members ◽  
King Philip's War ◽  
Native Communities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Native American Tribes

This chapter examines how King Philip’s War gave rise to a significant but often ignored or misperceived history of bondage, enslavement, and diaspora that took Native Americans far from their northeast homelands, and subjected them to a range of brutal conditions across an Atlantic World. It focuses on Algonquians’ transits into captivity as a consequence of the war, and historicizes this process within longer trajectories of European subjugation of Indigenous populations for labor. The chapter examines how Algonquian individuals and families were forcibly placed into New England colonial as well as Native communities at the war’s conclusion, and how others were transported out of the region for sale across the Atlantic World. The case of King Philip’s wife and son is especially complex, and the chapter considers how traditions around their purported sale into slavery in Bermuda interact with challenging racial politics and archival traces. Modern-day “reconnection” events have linked St. David’s Island community members in Bermuda to Native American tribes in New England. The chapter also reflects on wider dimensions of this Algonquian diaspora, which likely brought Natives to the Caribbean, Azores, and Tangier in North Africa, and propelled Native migrants/refugees into Wabanaki homelands.

Representing Native American Women in Early Colonial American Writings: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Juan Ortiz and John Smith

Sederi ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 25-45
Author(s):  
Mª Carmen Gomez Galisteo
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Contact Period ◽  
Native American Women ◽  
American Women ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Hernando De Soto ◽  
Female Roles ◽  
Cabeza De Vaca

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.

Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England

2009 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen W. Silliman
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
New England ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Cultural Persistence ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
Eastern Pequot

The archaeological study of Native Americans during colonial periods in North America has centered largely on assessing the nature of cultural change and continuity through material culture. Although a valuable approach, it has been hindered by focusing too much on the dichotomies of change and continuity, rather than on their interrelationship, by relying on uncritical cultural categories of artifacts and by not recognizing the role of practice and memory in identity and cultural persistence. Ongoing archaeological research on the Eastern Pequot reservation in Connecticut, which was created in 1683 and has been inhabited continuously since then by Eastern Pequot community members, permits a different view of the nature of change and continuity. Three reservation sites spanning the period between ca. 1740 and 1840 accentuate the scale and temporality of social memory and the relationships between practice and materiality. Although the reservation sites show change when compared to the "precontact baseline," they show remarkable continuity during the reservation period. The resulting interpretation provides not only more grounded and appropriately scaled renderings of past cultural practices but also critical engagements with analytical categories that carry significant political weight well outside of archaeological circles.

scholarly journals Resuming Gynocratic Principles: Cultural Reterritorialization of Native Traditions in Linda Hogan’s Fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Xiaofang Sun
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
White Male ◽  
Cultural Assimilation ◽  
Linda Hogan ◽  
Native Community ◽  
Native Culture ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Early Colonial

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.

scholarly journals Disturbance of Native Americans as Reflected in Selected Folkloric Poems of Luci Tapahonso, Joy Harjo and Simon Ortiz

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (7) ◽  
pp. 248
Author(s):  
Widad Allawi Saddam ◽  
Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya ◽  
Hardev Kaur A/P Jujar Singh ◽  
Manimangai Mani
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
American People ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Joy Harjo ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Phase ◽  
Luci Tapahonso ◽  
The Mind

As a result of colonialization  and assimilation, the natives were disturbed between past and present. Adopting the colonizer culture, style of life, language and changing home place come together in the mind of Native American people and lead them to be confused; they intermingle between past and present. They want to be themselves but the colonizer wants them to be the others. This feeling of disturbance affected Native American people, especially the chosen poets for this study. This paper shows how Native American people reflect their disturbance toward the colonization in their folkloric poetry. It explains how each element of folklore represents their disturbance towards the colonizer’s dominant culture. This paper will be done under postcolonial framework utilizing Frantz Fanon’s second views about the natives. Disturbance follows assimilation and they together forced Native Americans to present fighting literature which shows the third phase of Fanon.  

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.

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 ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Metal Artifacts ◽  
European Origin ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Hernando De Soto ◽  
European Colonialism

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.

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