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What is Indigenous Studies?

“Indigenous Studies focuses upon such aspects of Indigenous peoples’ experience as arts, cultures, ecologies, economies, histories, identities, knowledge, languages, literatures, music, community and political dynamics, relations with others, and ways of knowing.” —University of Calgary

http://www.ucalgary.ca/indg/iisdefinted

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What defines  “Indigenous Peoples”

To be defined as Indigenous people, a group must exhibit most of the following characteristics:

political organization now, or within the past few centuries, of a non-state form;

colonization (usually, but not necessarily, by Europeans) of a limited or massive settlement form involving appropriation of lands;

enduring relations of domination-subordination and hegemonic marginalization;

holistic, non-capitalist worldviews which emphasize the integration of the people with the land and water and which form the basis of a sense of solidarity or ‘consciousness of kind’ as a people distinct from others;

collective self-definition as “Indigenous”, “Indian”, “Aboriginal”, “Native” or “the people”; and

engagement in a struggle to maintain or regain both their culture and some degree of collective self-determination and sovereignty over their own lands. http://www.ucalgary.ca/indg/iisdefinted

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Lots of the “peer reviewed” portions of interesting Indigenous studies articles

Indian Agriculture in America: Prehistory to the Present http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?sid=12d6a838-c448-4aa0-bf02-781ffaaa66dd%40sessionmgr120&vid=0&hid=102&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=48106368&db=ahl

Enduring Traditions: The Native Peoples of New England  http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?sid=11837bbf-2039-48d4-a89a-72fbed9d9087%40sessionmgr101&vid=0&hid=102&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=48106696&db=ahl

The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?sid=35d09524-323a-4550-8a6e-7bf33a6be2b2%40sessionmgr101&vid=0&hid=102&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=48106434&db=ahl

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Some essays that are interesting but are also hard to track down —here is a review if you want to go to a lot of trouble

NATIVE AMERICAN WOMAN ACROSS TIME — Review Essay

http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=8081ba3a-bdd7-41d9-a0ef-028245010057%40sessionmgr101&vid=0&hid=102 

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Retrieving the Red Continent: Settler Colonialism and the History of American Indians in the US

Author: Frederick E. Hoxie

Abstract: While present in the contemporary academy, American Indian history remains marginalized by being associated with regional and national histories of the United States. Recently, postcolonial scholarship has provided a pathway out of that marginalization. The postcolonial critique of traditional anthropological and historical writing about indigenous peoples suggests a new way to imagine the relationship between American Indian history and other areas of scholarship. The most promising aspect of this critique is the formulation of ‘settler colonialism’. That framework first emerged among geographers and has recently been embraced by historians and anthropologists. The settler colonial framework offers a way to conceive of the Native past in a transnational context as well as to understand indigenous encounters with modernity as an ongoing struggle with colonial rule rather than as a campaign to accommodate Native people to ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ or to ‘assimilate’ them into a nation state.

Hannah’s note: This article does not look directly at Indigenous studies, but rather gives an “in” to indigenous studies. What I mean is, this article addresses the problems in many narratives of labelling Natives as a “problem” that settles have to “deal with” and takes on the lens of settler-colonialism that says it was a struggle between settler and settled. This article makes room for Indigenous studies to come into play and makes the claim for the importance of Indigenous studies.

tl;dr If you want to know why Indigenous studies is a thing, you have to know why Settler-Colonialism is a thing.

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“Archaeologists of Jamestown and other southern sites confirm that Natives in pre-colonial North Carolina and Virginia, the Upland South, Coastal Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama ate well and often from a huge and diverse larder. “The broyling of their fish over the flame of fier,” by John White, c. 1590, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.”

—Mother Corn and the Dixie Pig Native Food in the Native South, Rayna Green

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Mother Corn and the Dixie Pig Native Food in the Native South

Author: Rayna Green

“Native food was once the only food story. Early travelers and colonists of the Americas spoke at length of the abundance and richness of the natural environment, the good that Indians made of it, and the absolute dependence of the would-be colonists upon Indian mastery of that environment. From their indigenous relatives in Mexico, Southeastern (and Southwestern) Indians had learned the knowledge and skills associated with cultivating corn, which they shared with receptive settlers. Pounding corn on the Cherokee Reservation in North Carolina, c. 1950, courtesy of the Durwood Barbour Collection of North Carolina Postcards (P077), North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”

Hannah’s note: This article makes some interesting observations about the stories of early settlers being saved by native’s corn and kindness as well as a look into the archaeology of Jamestown. However, much of the article covers the contemporary implications of native food and how it relates to southern food today. 

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Shell-Tempered Pottery From the Upper Mississippi River Valley

Author: Robert F. Boszhardt

Abstract: Shell-tempered ceramics first appear in the archaeological record of the upper Mississippi River Valley in the post-Hopeivellian period (ca. A.D. 250-500) of the Woodland Tradition as a minority ware in northwestern Illinois and south-central Wisconsin. Following a five-century hiatus, shell tempering was reintroduced via Middle Mississippian expansion from the American Bottom into the northern hinterland about A.D. 1000-1050. The following century witnessed the adoption of this technology by Terminal Woodland groups as they also incorporated corn agriculture into their economy. After A.D. 1150, shell tempering dominated the ceramics of the intensive agricultural Oneota Culture until French contact and the coinciding introduction of brass kettles. Experimental replication of Oneota wares, coupled with archaeological evidence, offers insight into the manufacturing technology of this last prehistoric culture in this region.

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On Archaeology and the Study of Ritual: Considering Inadequacies in the Culture-History Approach and Quests for Internal "Meaning"

Abstract: In this issue of 'American Antiquity' Ronald J. Mason contends that the authors created a "chimera" of the Missaukee Earthworks site as a regional ceremonial center in Late Prehistoric Michigan (1200-1600) by misinterpreting archaeological and ethnohistoric data in their 2006 article "Bear's Journey and the Study of Ritual in Archaeology" (see entry 44:11408). In considering Mason's critique, the authors reemphasize the value and methods of studying ritual via material remains and show that Mason's arguments simply serve to exemplify why the culture-historic approach has failed in its effort to understand the precontact Native cultures of the Great Lakes. David S. Whitley contends the authors are misguided about the aims of archaeological studies of ritual and the place of "meaning" in these studies. In considering the "meaning" archaeologists seek in studies of past ritual, the authors emphasize the problems they see in quests for what is ultimately immaterial and unrecoverable, the internal or emotive "meaning" of past ritual.

Authors: Howey, Meghan C. L. [email protected] O'Shea, John [email protected]

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Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early North America Edited by A. G. Roeber

“The anthology succeeds in recovering Native as well as missionary voices, carefully building context to make those voices understandable to contemporary readers and reintroducing these important texts in exciting ways that will stimulate further study.” —R. A. Bucko, Choice

“Scholars of Native Americans owe a tremendous debt to the documents that religious missionaries left behind. Although they regularly misunderstood the cultures of the individuals whose souls they coveted, missionaries recorded detailed views of the peoples they observed. In a few cases, the records were hardly haphazard or piecemeal. Instead, they were early modern ethnographies—systematically organized explanations of native societies.” —History: Reviews of New Books, September 1, 2008