scholarly journals Native Voices Exhibition: Stories of health, wellness, and illness from American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Frederick B. Wood ◽  
Anne R. Altemus ◽  
Elliot R. Siegel

The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) exhibition known as Native Voices reflected Donald A.B. Lindberg M.D.’s keen and long-held desire to help improve public understanding of Native American health challenges and honor the culture, tradition, and healing ways of Native Peoples. A centerpiece of the exhibition was a large set of video interviews that Dr. Lindberg conducted with Native health and community leaders. Dr. Lindberg and his team engaged Native advisors in the exhibition development; sought Native input through Listening Circles, Tribal Consultations; and site visits, and made the video interviews accessible via interactive kiosks and iPads. For its time, this was state-of-the-art exhibition technology. The exhibition also included Native artifacts and art works to complement the videos, including a scale model of the iconic Hokule’a Native Hawaiian voyaging canoe, and a full-size Lummi Indian healing totem pole. The totem journeyed across the U.S. prior to its installation next to the NLM herbal garden in Bethesda, MD. A traveling version of the exhibition visited more than 130 venues in 40 States across the U.S. The interview clips and other content are accessible on the exhibition website, and the full-length interviews are retained in the NLM permanent video collection.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Katherine Gottlieb ◽  
Cynthia Lindquist ◽  
Theodore A. Mala ◽  
Marjorie K. Leimomi M. Mau

Personal reflections on Donald A.B. Lindberg M.D. are offered by four Native American leaders who were instrumental in the successful development of the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) Native Voices Exhibition: Stories of Health and Wellness from American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians. A uniquely collaborative effort, the exhibition features nearly 100 videographed interviews conducted by Dr. Lindberg with Native elders, healers, leaders, and people. He is credited with the incorporation of indigenous peoples’ healing knowledge in a personal and relational way, making for a wonderful journey together that was a very large chapter in his life and that of the authors.


Author(s):  
Kélina Gotman

Native American dancers in the 1890s rebelling against the U.S. government’s failure to uphold treaties protecting land rights and rations were accused of fomenting a dancing ‘craze’. Their dancing—which hoped for a renewal of Native life—was subject to intense government scrutiny and panic. The government anthropologist James Mooney, in participant observation and fieldwork, described it as a religious ecstasy like St. Vitus’s dance. The Ghost Dance movement escalated with the proliferation of reports, telegraphs, and letters circulating via Washington, DC. Although romantically described as ‘geognosic’—nearly mineral—ancestors of the whites, Native rebels in the Plains were told to stop dancing so they could work and thus modernize; their dancing was deemed excessive, wasteful, and unproductive. The government’s belligerently declared state of exception—effectively cultural war—was countered by one that they performed ecstatically. ‘Wasted’ energy, dancers maintained, trumped dollarization—the hollow ‘use value’ of capitalist biopower.


Author(s):  
Elisa Eastwood Pulido

A spiritual biography, this book chronicles the journey of Margarito Bautista (1878–1961) from Mormonism to the Third Convention, a Latter-day Saint (Mormon) splinter group he fomented in 1935–1936, to Colonia Industrial/Nueva Jerusalén, a polygamist utopia Bautista founded in 1947. It argues that Bautista embraced Mormon belief in indigenous exceptionalism in 1901 and rapidly rose through the ranks of Mormon priesthood until convinced that the Mormon hierarchy was not invested in the development of native American peoples, as promoted in the Church’s canon. This realization resulted in tensions over indigenous self-governance within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church) and Bautista’s 1937 excommunication. The book contextualizes Bautista’s thought with a chapter on the spiritual conquest of Mexico in 1513 and another on the arrival of Mormons in Mexico. In addition to accounts of Bautista’s congregation-building on both sides of the U.S. border, this volume includes an examination of Bautista’s magnum opus, a 564-page tome hybridizing Aztec history and Book of Mormon narratives, and his prophetic plan for the recovery of indigenous authority in the Americas. Bautista’s excommunication catapulted him into his final spiritual career, that of a utopian founder. In the establishment of his colony, Bautista found a religious home, free from Euro-American oversight, where he implemented his prophetic plan for Mexico’s redemption. His plan included obedience to early Mormonism’s most stringent practices, polygamy and communalism. Bautista nonetheless hoped his community would provide a model for Mexicans willing to prepare the world for Christ’s millennial reign.


1995 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 288-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip A. May ◽  
James R. Moran

Purpose. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of a wide range of potentially useful strategies to address the prevention of alcohol misuse among American Indians. This broad approach to the review is useful because the extreme heterogeneity of the American Indian population requires that health promotion professionals explore many options and tailor their activities to specific communities. Search Method. A literature search was initiated through MEDLINE using the following key words: prevention, alcohol, substance abuse, American Indian, and Native American. The search yielded 29 articles from the years 1982 through 1994. These articles, along with 45 previously identified in three overview articles, form the basis of the review and discussion in this paper. Summary of findings. As a group, American Indians experience many health problems that are related to alcohol misuse. Comparison of Indians to non-Indians shows that the age of first involvement with alcohol is younger, the frequency and amount of drinking is greater, and negative consequences are more common. Health promotion programs that address these issues must take into account American Indian heterogeneity and should use a comprehensive approach that addresses both heavy drinking and the sequelae of problems related to alcohol misuse. Major Conclusions. Important concepts for providing health promotion services to this population are: cultural relevance must be carefully planned and monitored; individuals in the local community must be involved; the drunken Indian stereotype must be addressed; and community empowerment should be an important goal.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. Winkelman

Abstract The ways new games typically develop might be viewed as a continuum ranging from very gradual “evolution” based on mutations introduced to a single progenitor during play or recall, to sudden “intelligent design” based on a purposeful and original combination — or even invention — of ludemes independent of any particular lines of transmission. This paper argues that two proprietary 20th-century games, C.A. Neves’s Fang den Hut! and Lizzie Magie’s The Landlord’s Game, were developed in a different way, a bit outside the typical continuum. It analyzes the games’ general typologies, and specific ludemes, concluding that both games are modern adaptations of traditional Native American games encountered, not through play or even contact with players, but through the seminal ethnographic publications of Stewart Culin. Specifically, Fang den Hut! derives from Boolik via Games of the North American Indians, and The Landlord’s Game derives from Zohn Ahl via Chess and Playing-Cards.


Author(s):  
Joakim Peter ◽  
Wayne Chung Tanaka ◽  
Aiko Yamashiro

Cultural reciprocity, sharing, and trust between Native Hawaiians and Micronesians, which began in the 1970s, has flourished to this day, as most visibly illustrated with the continued voyaging of the Hōkūleʻa. However, this relationship contrasts starkly with the groundswell of anti-Micronesian sentiment underlying recent discriminatory healthcare policies for Compact of Free Association (“COFA”) residents in Hawaiʻi. These are the turbulent waters community advocates must navigate in the new politics of race in Hawai‘i. This chapter argues for a revisiting of the deep Pacific Islander cultural values inherent in the lessons of Grand Master Navigator Pius “Papa” Mau Piailug, whose sharing of traditional wayfinding knowledge helped establish a deep relationship of respect and cooperation between Hawaiians and Micronesians, and made possible the ongoing progress of the Hōkūleʻa in uniting the Pacific, and the world. Contrasting these values with the rhetoric- and stereotype-based approach of the U.S. and Hawaiʻi in establishing discriminatory healthcare policies for COFA residents, it offers suggestions for a more progressive and mutually beneficial policymaking approach through culturally-grounded foundational themes, and suggests principles for better engagement among COFA communities in Hawaiʻi, Hawaiʻi’s larger communities, and government leaders.


Peyote Effect ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 44-54
Author(s):  
Alexander S. Dawson

This chapter explores the first sustained efforts to enact a federal ban on peyote in the United States. Missionaries and Indian Agents began pressing for a ban in the late nineteenth century, only to be thwarted by Native American peyotists and their allies in the Bureau of American Ethnology, who argued both that peyote worship should be protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and that it was not deleterious to the health of individual peyotists. By 1917, however, state governments were beginning to pass local bans, with the first prohibitions passed in Colorado and Utah. In early 1918, the U.S. House of Representatives took up the cause, holding hearings on a proposed ban. The record of those hearings offers a fascinating glimpse into the ways that racial anxieties were articulated through anxieties over peyotism in the early twentieth century. The ban passed the House but failed in the Senate.


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