Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons^™

Race, Nation, And Religion In The Americas, Edited By Henry Goldschmidt And Elizabeth Mcalister, R. Bryan Bademan

History Faculty Publications

Book review by R. Bryan Bademan.

Goldschmidt, Henry and Elizabeth McAlister, eds. Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

ISBN 978-0195149197

Native America History, Comparative Genocide And The Holocaust: Historiography, Debate And Critical Analysis, Brenden W. Rensink

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study explores the complex issues surrounding comparative genocide studies and how Native American history relates to this field. Historical contexts for Native American historiography, particularly the scholarship of Vine Deloria, Jr., are examined. In addition, the manifestation of some problematic trends in the field is detailed through the mordant debate between scholars of native America and the Jewish Holocaust. Arguments over Holocaust uniqueness and how the depopulation of Native America should be classified typifies how certain aspects of comparative genocide studies have a propensity for subjectively motivated and biased methodology. Finally, a case study using the historiography of the …

Beneath These Red Cliffs, Ronald L. Holt

All USU Press Publications

In this new and updated edition---with a foreword by Lora Tom, chairwoman of the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah---Holt recounts the survival of a people against all odds. A compound of rapid white settlement of the most productive Southern Paiute homelands, especially their farmlands near tributaries of the Colorado River; conversion by and labor for the Mormon settlers; and government neglect placed the Utah Paiutes in a state of dependency that ironically culminated in the 1957 termination of their status as federally recognized Indians. The recognition and attendant services were not restored until 1980, but the act revived the Paiutes' …

Islamic Art: An Exploration Of Pattern, Carol Bier

Textile Research Works

As an historian of Islamic art in the Department of Art History at the Maryland Institute College of Art, I am continually learning as I endeavor to teach my students about pattern. Teaching about pattern in Islamic art has facilitated my own exploration of geometry in ways that also benefits my students. This visual presentation explores the results of a single assignment that pertains to coloring a linear plate reproduced in Bourgoin’s classic work [6], Arabic Geometrical Pattern and Design.

Atanarjuat And The Ideological Work Of Contemporary Indigenous Filmmaking, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

Ilanaaq is the latest North American example of “playing Indian” (Deloria 1998), a practice with vast historical precedent. With ilanaaq, Canada joins a host of nations who have turned to symbols of local indigeneity to assert their national distinctiveness. Such appropriation presents indigenous artists with a dilemma. The current flowering of indigenous letters, art and cinema in North America is generally taken as evidence that Canada and the United States, as thriving multiculturalist democracies, have broken with an earlier history of the expropriation and displacement of the Americas’ indigenous peoples. The art bears witness to a new historical period, in …

Book Review: Viet Cong At Wounded Knee: The Trail Of A Blackfeet Activist, Tom Holm

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Woody Kipp's life story is a reflection of a new generation of Native writers and activists. His autobiography has nothing to do with trying to save the white world from itself or to explain Indians to a curious and perhaps even sympathetic white audience. The white world literally and figuratively took aim at Woody Kipp (and a number of other American Indian Vietnam veterans) for daring to oppose the injustices he saw in Indian life. He became, as the title of his book indicates, the then-current enemy of the American state. He was, ironically, a domestic version of the Viet …

Peace Medals And The Great Father, Mark G. Thiel

Library Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

The Seven Years' War In New York State: Introduction, Timothy J. Shannon

History Faculty Publications

Ask the average person on the street about the Seven Years' War and you are likely to get a blank stare. Try again, only this time call the conflict "The French and Indian War" and you might get a faint smile of recognition. Take a different approach: ask random strangers their opinion about The Last of the Mohicans. Many will tell you they loved it, although they will more likely be thinking about Daniel Day-Lewis than James Fenimore Cooper.

Such has been the fate of one of the most important events in early history. In 2004, the 250th anniversary of …

The Good, The Bad, And The Inverted: Rhetorical Strategies In The Portrayal Of Cultures In Ruth Benedict's Patterns Of Culture And Margaret Mead's Sex And Temperament In Three Primitive Societies, Phillip Guddemi

Pacific Studies

Patterns of Culture and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, published a year apart, have a startlingly parallel structure. Discussions of anthropological method open both; the question of the individual and deviance closes both. The triad of cultures in each book is arranged in the order of "the good, the bad, and the inverted." The first culture emphasizes cooperation and nurturance, the second competition and discord. The third culture in each inverts some feature of Western society, either in the economic realm (Kwakiutl) or in that of gendered personality (Tchambuli). Cultural inversion places Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead in …

Margaret Mead's Other Samoa: Rereading Social Organization Of Manu'a, Paul Shankman

Pacific Studies

Derek Freeman focused his attention on Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa to such an extent that her ethnography of Samoa, Social Organization of Manu'a, has been neglected. This professional monograph demonstrates Mead's credibility as an ethnographer and as a modern student of social organization. While Freeman believed that Mead was young, naive, and gullible, a closer examination of Social Organization of Manu'a indicates that she was energetic, resourceful, perceptive, and theoretically sophisticated. Any evaluation of Mead's Samoan research should include this enduring contribution to our knowledge of the islands.

Vol. 28 Nos. 3/4 (2005): Pacific Studies Full Issue, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Pacific Studies is published two times a year by The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, Brigham Young University Hawai‘i #1979, 55–220 Kulanui Street, Lāʻie, Hawai‘i 96762, but responsibility for opinions expressed in the articles rests with the authors alone. Subscription rate is US $26.00 yearly, payable to The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies (formerly The Pacific Institute) is an organization funded by Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. The Center assists the University in meeting its cultural and educational goals by undertaking a program of teaching, research, …

Vol. 28 Nos. 3/4 (2005): Pacific Studies Front Matter, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Front Matter for the Vol. 28, Nos. 3/4-Sept/Dec 2005 edition of the Pacific Studies Journal.

Margaret Mead And Psychology: The Education Of An Anthropologist, Patricia A. Francis

Pacific Studies

Margaret Mead's brand of anthropology was deeply rooted in the psychological. Mead began her career in psychology, taking a master's degree in that field but switching to anthropology at the urging of Ruth Benedict. Mead's background in psychology equipped her particularly well to embark on her field trip to American Samoa in 1925. While the anthropological training of her day did not emphasize practical aspects of conducting fieldwork, Mead's training in psychology taught her how to conduct case studies, design experiments, and measure results quantitatively and qualitatively. Mead's family background also contributed to her training as a social scientist, particularly …

Margaret Mead's Individual In Culture, Or Cultures And Personalities Without Embarrassment, Gerald Sullivan

Pacific Studies

Margaret Mead is associated with the rubric "culture and personality." Mead herself preferred the formula "individual in culture." This essay traces Mead's uses of her preferred formula from 1928 through 1946. Over the course of this period, Mead developed her idea from its initial concerns with the "role" of the individual in Samoan culture in ways which came to focus on the person as the conjunction of biological, developmental (or "genetic"), and cultural processes. The essay examines both published, if now little known, materials and Ruth Benedict's notes taken during a course on "The Study of the Individual in Culture" …

The Correspondence Associated With Margaret Mead's Samoa Research: What Does It Really Tell Us?, James Côté

Pacific Studies

Derek Freeman based much of his critique of Margaret Mead's Samoa research on the letters she exchanged with Franz Boas and others. However, as I have indicated elsewhere (Cöté 1998, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c), Freeman seriously misrepresented the content and intention of these letters. The present article extends the examination of archival material by reviewing letters from the late 1920s associated with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa, which reveal that Mead originally wrote it as a commercial book, and that she was heavily influenced by her publisher to further sensationalize her account of life in Samoa. Additional archived …

Contesting The Erotic Zone: Margaret Mead's Fieldwork Photographs Of Samoa, Sharon W. Tiffany

Pacific Studies

Margaret Mead's photographs taken during her first ethnographic fieldwork in the South Pacific have received little scholarly attention. While some of Mead's images borrowed from earlier photographic conventions, her pictures also challenged prevailing representations of Polynesian women. Mead's photos experimented with alternative visual narratives about Samoan women's bodies and their everyday lives, in contrast to signature images of Pacific Islander women as commoditized sex objects, exoticized women of power, or as romanticized primitives. Mead's first effort at using a camera in the field provided a spectrum of representations useful for re-interpreting female embodiment and the gender politics of the photographic …

Margaret Mead And Gregory Bateson In The Sepik, 1938: A Timely Polemic From A Lost Anthropological Efflorescence, Eric Kline Silverman

Pacific Studies

Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson's 1938 study of a Iatmul-speaking village in the middle Sepik River, Papua New Guinea, remains an anthropological efflorescence. At the very least, this collaboration resulted in a well-known fieldwork photo: Mead and Bateson in the famous "mosquito room." Ironically, little is actually known about the 1938 undertaking, which remains, however famous, sadly obscure. Towards correcting this misjudgment, I have two objectives. First, I want to provide a selective overview of the 1938 project, focusing on its unique outlook, tone, voices, morality, and theoretical perspectives. But my objective is not merely historical and descriptive. Hence, my …

Using And Abusing The Works Of The Ancestors: Margaret Mead, Mary Catherine Bateson

Pacific Studies

Because early-twentieth-century anthropologists worked under very different circumstances from those of anthropologists today, they have become easy to criticize and hard to use fruitfully. Finding the appropriate use of Margaret Mead's work today is a goal she would have felt at home with. Criticism and correction are essential, but opportunistic uses of Mead's work, legacy, and persona, like the attack by Derek Freeman that made him famous, are essentially wasteful and exploitative. By focusing attention on Mead's earliest work, Freeman obscured her lifelong contribution and undermined concepts she helped embed in American thinking, like the indispensable (if vague) concept of …

Introduction: The Essentialization Of Margaret Mead, Nancy Mcdowell

Pacific Studies

Margaret Mead and her contributions to Pacific anthropology play a large role in the discipline, and anthropologists need to consider her work carefully and in context. Evaluators of Mead are often guilty of simplifying her work rather than assessing its full complexity. The reasons for this phenomenon are examined here: several commentators have not read the work carefully, while others select only some aspects of it to support their analyses. Many misrepresentations are the result of a failure to consider her work in its appropriate historical context, and a few employ Mead as a symbol or trope for broader phenomena, …

Tales From The Internet: Margaret Mead's Legacy In American Culture, Merrily Stover

Pacific Studies

This essay explores the importance of Margaret Mead for American society as revealed through the cultural domain of the Internet. By examining sites accessible through popular search engines, the essay analyzes Mead's life using Joseph Campbell's myth of the hero's journey. Mead's legend emphasizes her journey to far places and her return with important gifts of knowledge for society. Mead is also a distinctly American hero by representing values of pioneering, defense of personal freedom, and commitment to bettering society. The recognition of the importance of culture on human behavior, Mead's own life as a role model for people, the …

Gender, Sexuality, And Race: Rereading The Dakota War, Jonathan Went

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

December 26, 1862, marked the culmination of the brutal hostilities that transpired between the Dakota Indians and American soldiers and settlers over the late summer and fall months in Minnesota. The American government condemned thirtyeight Dakota men to die on the gallows as punishment for their involvement in the war. While the event served as punishment for the Dakotas, it was also a culturally pregnant spectacle that provides deeper insight into not only the war but also Dakotan and American societies. The hanging was just as much about manhood, sexuality, and race, as it was about retribution.

Organized thematically, this …

Ironton Resident Documenting Lost Art In River, Chillicothe Gazette

Indian Head Rock Project

An article published in the Chillicothe Gazette on Steve Shaffer's research on petroglyphs in the Ohio River.

Freedom House In The Pacific: Democratic Advancement In Fourteen Island States, Dag Anckar

Pacific Studies

The Freedom House surveys of political rights and civil liberties in the countries of the world show that the small Pacific island states perform remarkably well as democratic units. A further analysis of the surveys identifies two characteristic traits of democracy Pacific style. First, the general trend over time is one of improvement and advancement. Second, this fortunate development is promoted by betterments in political rights rather than civil liberties. This probably reflects efforts in the region to introduce concessions to traditional authority. However, the Freedom House conception of democracy does not include considerations of policy. Less than prosperous and …

Expressions Of Interest: Informal Usury In Urban Papua New Guinea, Michael Goddard

Pacific Studies

This article examines the nature and practice of small scale usury in a "grassroots" urban community in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. In this environment the moneylenders are people of limited financial resources, barely richer than their clients. The latter are often self-employed in informal occupations. Using examples from cases where usurers have taken defaulting debtors to urban "village courts," I show how debt is negotiated by usurers and clients, and I indicate differences between local attitudes toward usury and those that are generally held in Western societies. I discuss prevalent views in social science literature about the influence of …

Neville Proof Fence, Antonio De Paulo Buti

Pacific Studies

The separation of Aboriginal children from their families formed a central plank of Aboriginal affairs policy in Australia for at least the first six decades of the twentieth century. In no state was the separation policy more pervasive than in Western Australia. And no one individual stands out more in the planning and implementation of the removal or separation policy than Auber Octavius Neville, chief protector of Aborigines in Western Australia from 1915 until 1940. This article focuses on Aboriginal affairs in Western Australia during the Neville era and also on the influence his views and ideas attained on the …

Vol. 28 Nos. 1/2 (2005): Pacific Studies Front Matter, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Front Matter for the Vol. 28, Nos. 1/2-Mar 2005 edition of the Pacific Studies Journal.

Cultural Constraints And Corrosive Colonization: Western Commerce In Aotearoa/ New Zealand And The Extinction Of The Huia (Heteralocha Acutirostris), Clark S. Monson

Pacific Studies

Early Maori occupation of New Zealand was marked by profligate use of avian resources and the resultant extinction of numerous species including the archipelago's famed moas. As in other Polynesian cultures, however, Maoris came to adopt conservation strategies. I suggest that the Maori conservation technique of tapu or rahui - chiefly prohibitions governing the harvest of vulnerable biological resources - offers crucial insights for modern managers. The former efficacy of rahui is examined through a detailed case study of an extinct New Zealand bird - the huia. Formerly protected by the cultural and religious potency of tapu, the huia met …

Vol. 28 Nos. 1/2 (2005): Pacific Studies Full Issue, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Pacific Studies is published two times a year by The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, Brigham Young University Hawai‘i #1979, 55–220 Kulanui Street, Lāʻie, Hawai‘i 96762, but responsibility for opinions expressed in the articles rests with the authors alone. Subscription rate is US $26.00 yearly, payable to The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies (formerly The Pacific Institute) is an organization funded by Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. The Center assists the University in meeting its cultural and educational goals by undertaking a program of teaching, research, …

Honoring The Elders: Interviews With Two Lakota Men, Deborah E. Bowen

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The beliefs that honoring the elders, commitment to family, and the connectedness to all creation are paramount are intrinsic to Lakota culture. Two Lakota elders, Albert White Hat, Sr. and Sylvan White Hat, Sr. are interviewed for this article. They express their concerns with major social justice issues, and offer hope for future generations of Lakota children. A strengths-based perspective of social work practice is compared to traditional Lakota customs and practices.

Coyote Steals Fire, Northwest Band Shoshone Nation

All USU Press Publications

"Coyote was tired of being cold," says this traditional Shoshone tale about the arrival of fire in the northern Wasatch region.

Members of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation developed the concept for this retelling in collaboration with book arts teacher Tamara Zollinger. Together, they wrote and illustrated the book.

Bright watercolor-and-salt techniques provide a winning background to the hand-cut silhouettes of the characters. The lively, humorous story about Coyote and his friends is complemented perfectly by later pages written by Northwestern Shoshone elders on the historical background and cultural heritage of the Shoshone nation.

An audio CD with …