Indian Country: Essays on Contemporary Native CultureSince first contact, Natives and newcomers have been involved in an increasingly complex struggle over power and identity. Modern “Indian wars” are fought over land and treaty rights, artistic appropriation, and academic analysis, while Native communities struggle among themselves over membership, money, and cultural meaning. In cultural and political arenas across North America, Natives enact and newcomers protest issues of traditionalism, sovereignty, and self-determination. In these struggles over domination and resistance, over different ideologies and Indian identities, neither Natives nor other North Americans recognize the significance of being rooted together in history and culture, or how representations of “Indianness” set them in opposition to each other. In Indian Country: Essays on Contemporary Native Culture, Gail Guthrie Valaskakis uses a cultural studies approach to offer a unique perspective on Native political struggle and cultural conflict in both Canada and the United States. She reflects on treaty rights and traditionalism, media warriors, Indian princesses, powwow, museums, art, and nationhood. According to Valaskakis, Native and non-Native people construct both who they are and their relations with each other in narratives that circulate through art, anthropological method, cultural appropriation, and Native reappropriation. For Native peoples and Others, untangling the past—personal, political, and cultural—can help to make sense of current struggles over power and identity that define the Native experience today. Grounded in theory and threaded with Native voices and evocative descriptions of “Indian” experience (including the author’s), the essays interweave historical and political process, personal narrative, and cultural critique. This book is an important contribution to Native studies that will appeal to anyone interested in First Nations’ experience and popular culture. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 67
... move that was a forerunner to the conflicts years later in Akwesasne ( Ontario ) and Oka ( Quebec ) , and to the 1970s occupa- tions of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington and Wounded Knee in South Dakota . The angry protests of ...
... move to absorb Native people into common Cana- dian citizenship , and Native voices resonated with expressions of protest south of the border . The counter - attack on the White Paper was led by the National Indian Brotherhood , later ...
... move away from the notion of the narrative Other as an object , reified through time - distancing in writing that reflects an “ ethnographic pres- A Q ent ” ( Fabian , 1983 : 80 ) , 1 LIVING THE HERITAGE OF LAC DU FLAMBEAU ...
... moves toward what Native North Americans have long incorporated as lived experience : culture in the present woven with a kaleidoscopic past of intertwined experiences , representations , signifiers , and boundaries ; history as ...
... moved past the Catholic altar in her house with her hair dish in her hand to place graying combings of her hair in ... moving inland to forests and lakes , which we held in trust through our respect for the grace in sighting an eagle and ...
Contents
1 | |
9 | |
35 | |
Indians and Artifacts | 67 |
Claiming Land in Native America | 89 |
Images and Native Women | 125 |
Pow Wow and Being Indian | 151 |
Researching Indian Objects | 175 |
Being Indian and Belonging | 211 |
All My Relations | 255 |
REFERENCES | 259 |
INDEX | 283 |