Paige Raibmon’s book “Authentic Indians” take a closer look at the concept of authenticity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Focusing on the culturally diverse Aboriginal people of the Northwest Coast, Raibmon examines how both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people constructed and used the idea of the authentic Indian to achieve their goals. Drawing examples from three ‘episodes’ or stories about Aboriginal people of the Northwest Coast, Raibmon argues that authenticity is not a set marker that we can use to measure the distance between what an Aboriginal culture looks like today and what “real” Aboriginal culture looks like. Instead, Raibmon says that authenticity is an important and changing set of ideas that were used in different ways to achieve different results including solidifying the many perceived dichotomies between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples. She also discusses how the concept of authenticity was not only important to Aboriginal and non Aboriginal relationships in the late nineteenth century but also to these same relationships in the present.
Raibmon’s book focuses on stories of the people of the Northwest Coast in late nineteenth century United States and Canada. She has two main reasons for doing so. The first is because the area was the focus of much of the work being done by early American anthropology. Early Anthropology was focused on preserving as much as possible of the “vanishing Indian.” By doing so they provided copious examples of what “authentic” Indians should look like with photographs as well as artifacts of “traditional” Indian culture. Raibmon’s second reason for placing the focus of her book here because there were big political changes in the area at that same time. ...
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...n they were not. Aboriginals used this opportunity to assert their native identity in a way that challenged the idea of authenticity while at the same time playing into that idea.
This book and the Aboriginal people described within are successful in showing how late nineteenth century ideas of authenticity can at once be complied to and challenged, which is perhaps a reflection of how the definition for authenticity was created. One example Raibmon gives is the work Aboriginal people did in the hop fields. They were an important part of an important industry on the Northwest Coast which challenges the idea that authentic Indians were not part of modern economic endeavors, but at the same time the Aboriginals were using this economic opportunity to maintain ties with their kinship network as well as to locations that were traditionally culturally important.
Local histories written in the nineteenth century are often neglected today. Yet from these accounts, one can see a pattern develop: the myth of Indian extinction, the superiority of White colonists and also to understand how American attitudes and values evolved. The myths were put forth for a reason according to Jean O’Brien. O’Brien explains how the process came to fruition in Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. In the majority of local town histories, Indians are mentioned in passing, as a past that will never return. Indians were ancient, whereas English colonists brought modernity to New England. Jean O’Brien argues that local histories were the primary means by which white European Americans asserted
Dr. Daniel K. Richter is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at University of Pennsylvania. His focus on early Native American history has led to his writing several lauded books including Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Past, and The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Richter’s Facing East is perhaps, a culmination of his latter work. It is centered from a Native American perspective, an angle less thought about in general. Through the book, Richter takes this perspective into several different fields of study which includes literary analysis, environmental history, and anthropology. Combining different methodologies, Richter argues Americans can have a fruitful future, by understanding the importance of the American Indian perspective in America’s short history.
There are three parts in West’s book; the first part focuses on the sociological, ecological and economic relationships of the plains Indians, starting with the first establish culture of North America, the Clovis peoples. Going into extensive detail pertaining to early geology and ecology, West gives us a glimpse into what life on the early plains must have looked to early peoples. With vastly differing flora and fauna to what we know today, the early plains at the end of the first ice age, were a different place and lent itself to a diverse way of life. The Clovis peoples were accomplished hunters, focusing on the abundance of Pleistocene megafauna such as earlier, larger forms of bison. Though, little human remains were found, evidence of their s...
In a lively account filled that is with personal accounts and the voices of people that were in the past left out of the historical armament, Ronald Takaki proffers us a new perspective of America’s envisioned past. Mr. Takaki confronts and disputes the Anglo-centric historical point of view. This dispute and confrontation is started in the within the seventeenth-century arrival of the colonists from England as witnessed by the Powhatan Indians of Virginia and the Wamapanoag Indians from the Massachusetts area. From there, Mr. Takaki turns our attention to several different cultures and how they had been affected by North America. The English colonists had brought the African people with force to the Atlantic coasts of America. The Irish women that sought to facilitate their need to work in factory settings and maids for our towns. The Chinese who migrated with ideas of a golden mountain and the Japanese who came and labored in the cane fields of Hawaii and on the farms of California. The Jewish people that fled from shtetls of Russia and created new urban communities here. The Latinos who crossed the border had come in search of the mythic and fabulous life El Norte.
Talking Back to Civilization , edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, is a compilation of excerpts from speeches, articles, and texts written by various American Indian authors and scholars from the 1890s to the 1920s. As a whole, the pieces provide a rough testimony of the American Indian during a period when conflict over land and resources, cultural stereotypes, and national policies caused tensions between Native American Indians and Euro-American reformers. This paper will attempt to sum up the plight of the American Indian during this period in American history.
Banks, D., Erodes, R. (2004). Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement. Ojibwa Warrior. Retrieved January 20, 2005, from http://www.oupress.com/bookdetail.asp?isbn=0-8061-3580-8
This paper addresses the results of interviews, observations, and research of life in the Ottawa tribe, how they see themselves and others in society and in the tribe. I mainly focused on The Little River Band of Ottawa Indian tribe. I researched their languages, pecking order, and interviewed to discover the rituals, and traditions that they believe in. In this essay I revealed how they see themselves in society. How they see other people, how they see each other, what their values were, what a typical day was etc. I initially suspected that I would have got different responses from these questions but in reality the results in the questions were almost completely the same. I studied this topic because mostly all the people that are close to me are associated in the Ottawa tribe. I additionally love the Native American culture, I feel it is beautiful and has a free concept.
Native American literature from the Southeastern United States is deeply rooted in the oral traditions of the various tribes that have historically called that region home. While the tribes most integrally associated with the Southeastern U.S. in the American popular mind--the FIVE CIVILIZED TRIBES (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole)--were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) from their ancestral territories in the American South, descendents of those tribes have created compelling literary works that have kept alive their tribal identities and histories by incorporating traditional themes and narrative elements. While reflecting profound awareness of the value of the Native American past, these literary works have also revealed knowing perspectives on the meaning of the modern world in the lives of contemporary Native Americans.
LaDuke, Winona. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999. Print.
Bibliography: Bibliography 1. John Majewski, History of the American Peoples: 1840-1920 (Dubuque: Kent/Hunt Publishing, 2001). 2.
Pages one to sixty- nine in Indian From The Inside: Native American Philosophy and Cultural Renewal by Dennis McPherson and J. Douglas Rabb, provides the beginning of an in-depth analysis of Native American cultural philosophy. It also states the ways in which western perspective has played a role in our understanding of Native American culture and similarities between Western culture and Native American culture. The section of reading can be divided into three lenses. The first section focus is on the theoretical understanding of self in respect to the space around us. The second section provides a historical background into the relationship between Native Americans and British colonial power. The last section focus is on the affiliation of otherworldliness that exist between
Tovias, B. (2011). Colonialism on the prairies: Blackfoot settlement an cultural transformation, 1870 - 1920. Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press.
Thomas King uses an oral story-telling style of writing mingled with western narrative in his article “You’re Not the Indian I Had in Mind” to explain that Indians are not on the brink of extinction. Through this article in the Racism, Colonialism, and Indigeneity in Canada textbook, King also brings some focus to the topic of what it means to be “Indian” through the eyes of an actual Aboriginal versus how Aboriginals are viewed by other races of people. With his unique style of writing, King is able to bring the reader into the situations he describes because he writes about it like a story he is telling.
In Thomas King’s novel, The Inconvenient Indian, the story of North America’s history is discussed from his original viewpoint and perspective. In his first chapter, “Forgetting Columbus,” he voices his opinion about how he feel towards the way white people have told America’s history and portraying it as an adventurous tale of triumph, strength and freedom. King hunts down the evidence needed to reveal more facts on the controversial relationship between the whites and natives and how it has affected the culture of Americans. Mainly untangling the confusion between the idea of Native Americans being savages and whites constantly reigning in glory. He exposes the truth about how Native Americans were treated and how their actual stories were
Kugel, Rebecca, and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy. Native women's history in eastern North America before 1900: a guide to research and writing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.