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
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... the adoption of changing representations and narratives that we generate and express in our individual and social experience . Identity is continually contested and reconstructed in the discursive negotiation < INTRODUCTION 3.
Essays on Contemporary Native Culture Gail Guthrie Valaskakis. Identity is continually contested and reconstructed in the discursive negotiation of the complex alliances and social relations that constitute community . Built in the ...
... reconstructing traditional heritage and the “ collective reflexivity ” ( Fabian 1983 : 92 ) of lived cultural experience , biography is central to an ethnography that rec- ognizes the extent to which “ notions of the past and future are ...
... Bear River echoed the renewal of our col- lective recognition at Lac du Flambeau . Our annual pow wow is now part of a circuit of Indian socialization reconstructed in 1974 , < LIVING THE HERITAGE Of Lac du FLAMBEAU > 23.
... reconstructed Chippewa practice , our heritage ( Indian and Indian- abish ) became involved with outsiders in the whirlwind of a new Windigo : treaty rights . Treaty Wars In the circling seasons of 1974 , two Chippewa from Lac Courte ...
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 |