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Dancing the New World
From Christopher Columbus to \"first anthropologist\" Friar Bernardino de Sahagún, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers, conquistadors, clerics, scientists, and travelers wrote about the \"Indian\" dances they encountered throughout the New World. This was especially true of Spanish missionaries who intensively studied and documented native dances in an attempt to identify and eradicate the \"idolatrous\" behaviors of the Aztec, the largest indigenous empire in Mesoamerica at the time of its European discovery.
Dancing the New Worldtraces the transformation of the Aztec empire into a Spanish colony through written and visual representations of dance in colonial discourse-the vast constellation of chronicles, histories, letters, and travel books by Europeans in and about the New World. Scolieri analyzes how the chroniclers used the Indian dancing body to represent their own experiences of wonder and terror in the New World, as well as to justify, lament, and/or deny their role in its political, spiritual, and physical conquest. He also reveals that Spaniards and Aztecs shared an understanding that dance played an important role in the formation, maintenance, and representation of imperial power, and describes how Spaniards compelled Indians to perform dances that dramatized their own conquest, thereby transforming them into colonial subjects. Scolieri's pathfinding analysis of the vast colonial \"dance archive\" conclusively demonstrates that dance played a crucial role in one of the defining moments in modern history-the European colonization of the Americas.
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Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil
Doña Marina (La Malinche) ...Pocahontas ...Sacagawea-their names live on in historical memory because these women bridged the indigenous American and European worlds, opening the way for the cultural encounters, collisions, and fusions that shaped the social and even physical landscape of the modern Americas. But these famous individuals were only a few of the many thousands of people who, intentionally or otherwise, served as \"go-betweens\" as Europeans explored and colonized the New World.
In this innovative history, Alida Metcalf thoroughly investigates the many roles played by go-betweens in the colonization of sixteenth-century Brazil. She finds that many individuals created physical links among Europe, Africa, and Brazil-explorers, traders, settlers, and slaves circulated goods, plants, animals, and diseases. Intercultural liaisons produced mixed-race children. At the cultural level, Jesuit priests and African slaves infused native Brazilian traditions with their own religious practices, while translators became influential go-betweens, negotiating the terms of trade, interaction, and exchange. Most powerful of all, as Metcalf shows, were those go-betweens who interpreted or represented new lands and peoples through writings, maps, religion, and the oral tradition. Metcalf's convincing demonstration that colonization is always mediated by third parties has relevance far beyond the Brazilian case, even as it opens a revealing new window on the first century of Brazilian history.
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The Native Ground
InThe Native Ground, Kathleen DuVal argues that it was Indians rather than European would-be colonizers who were more often able to determine the form and content of the relations between the two groups. Along the banks of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, far from Paris, Madrid, and London, European colonialism met neither accommodation nor resistance but incorporation. Rather than being colonized, Indians drew European empires into local patterns of land and resource allocation, sustenance, goods exchange, gender relations, diplomacy, and warfare. Placing Indians at the center of the story, DuVal shows both their diversity and our contemporary tendency to exaggerate the influence of Europeans in places far from their centers of power. Europeans were often more dependent on Indians than Indians were on them. Now the states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado, this native ground was originally populated by indigenous peoples, became part of the French and Spanish empires, and in 1803 was bought by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. Drawing on archaeology and oral history, as well as documents in English, French, and Spanish, DuVal chronicles the successive migrations of Indians and Europeans to the area from precolonial times through the 1820s. These myriad native groups-Mississippians, Quapaws, Osages, Chickasaws, Caddos, and Cherokees-and the waves of Europeans all competed with one another for control of the region. Only in the nineteenth century did outsiders initiate a future in which one people would claim exclusive ownership of the mid-continent. After the War of 1812, these settlers came in numbers large enough to overwhelm the region's inhabitants and reject the early patterns of cross-cultural interdependence. As citizens of the United States, they persuaded the federal government to muster its resources on behalf of their dreams of landholding and citizenship. With keen insight and broad vision, Kathleen DuVal retells the story of Indian and European contact in a more complex and, ultimately, more satisfactory way.
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Modernity and Its Other
InModernity and Its OtherRobert Woods Sayre examines eighteenth-century North America through discussion of texts drawn from the period. He focuses on this unique historical moment when early capitalist civilization (modernity) in colonial societies, especially the British, interacted closely with Indigenous communities (the \"Other\") before the balance of power shifted definitively toward the colonizers.Sayre considers a variety of French perspectives as a counterpoint to the Anglo-American lens, including J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Philip Freneau, as well as both Anglo-American and French or French Canadian travelers in \"Indian territory,\" including William Bartram, Jonathan Carver, John Lawson, Alexander Mackenzie, Baron de Lahontan, Pierre Charlevoix, and Jean-Baptiste Trudeau.Modernity and Its Otheris an important addition to any North American historian's bookshelf, for it brings together the social history of the European colonies and the ethnohistory of the American Indian peoples who interacted with the colonizers.
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The Head in Edward Nugent's Hand
Roanoke is part of the lore of early America, the colony that disappeared. Many Americans know of Sir Walter Ralegh's ill-fated expedition, but few know about the Algonquian peoples who were the island's inhabitants. The Head in Edward Nugent's Hand examines Ralegh's plan to create an English empire in the New World but also the attempts of native peoples to make sense of the newcomers who threatened to transform their world in frightening ways.Beginning his narrative well before Ralegh's arrival, Michael Leroy Oberg looks closely at the Indians who first encountered the colonists. The English intruded into a well-established Native American world at Roanoke, led by Wingina, the weroance, or leader, of the Algonquian peoples on the island. Oberg also pays close attention to how the weroance and his people understood the arrival of the English: we watch as Wingina's brother first boards Ralegh's ship, and we listen in as Wingina receives the report of its arrival. Driving the narrative is the leader's ultimate fate: Wingina is decapitated by one of Ralegh's men in the summer of 1586.When the story of Roanoke is recast in an effort to understand how and why an Algonquian weroance was murdered, and with what consequences, we arrive at a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of what happened during this, the dawn of English settlement in America.
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Zamumo's Gifts
In 1540, Zamumo, the chief of the Altamahas in central Georgia, exchanged gifts with the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto. With these gifts began two centuries of exchanges that bound American Indians and the Spanish, English, and French who colonized the region. Whether they gave gifts for diplomacy or traded commodities for profit, Natives and newcomers alike used the exchange of goods such as cloth, deerskin, muskets, and sometimes people as a way of securing their influence. Gifts and trade enabled early colonies to survive and later colonies to prosper. Conversely, they upset the social balance of chiefdoms like Zamumo's and promoted the rise of new and powerful Indian confederacies like the Creeks and the Choctaws.Drawing on archaeological studies, colonial documents from three empires, and Native oral histories, Joseph M. Hall, Jr., offers fresh insights into broad segments of southeastern colonial history, including the success of Florida's Franciscan missionaries before 1640 and the impact of the Indian slave trade on French Louisiana after 1699. He also shows how gifts and trade shaped the Yamasee War, which pitted a number of southeastern tribes against English South Carolina in 1715-17. The exchanges at the heart of Zamumo's Gifts highlight how the history of Europeans and Native Americans cannot be understood without each other.
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Caciques and Cemi Idols
Takes a close look at the relationship between humans and
other (non-human) beings that are imbued with cemí power,
specifically within the Taíno inter-island cultural sphere
of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola Cemís are both
portable artifacts and embodiments of persons or spirit, which
the Taínos and other natives of the Greater Antilles (ca. AD
1000-1550) regarded as numinous beings with supernatural or magic
powers. This volume takes a close look at the relationship
between humans and other (non-human) beings that are imbued with
cemí power, specifically within the Taíno inter-island
cultural sphere encompassing Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. The
relationships address the important questions of identity and
personhood of the cemí icons and their human
“owners” and the implications of cemí
gift-giving and gift-taking that sustains a complex web of
relationships between caciques (chiefs) of Puerto Rico and
Hispaniola. Oliver provides a careful analysis of the four major
forms of cemís—three-pointed stones, large stone
heads, stone collars, and elbow stones—as well as face
masks, which provide an interesting contrast to the stone heads.
He finds evidence for his interpretation of human and cemí
interactions from a critical review of 16th-century Spanish
ethnohistoric documents, especially the Relación Acerca de
las Antigüedades de los Indios written by Friar Ramón
Pané in 1497–1498 under orders from Christopher
Columbus. Buttressed by examples of native resistance and
syncretism, the volume discusses the iconoclastic conflicts and
the relationship between the icons and the human beings. Focusing
on this and on the various contexts in which the relationships
were enacted, Oliver reveals how the cemís were central to
the exercise of native political power. Such cemís were
considered a direct threat to the hegemony of the Spanish
conquerors, as these potent objects were seen as allies in the
native resistance to the onslaught of Christendom with its icons
of saints and virgins.
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Talking Taino
Keegan and Carlson, combined, have spent over 45 years
conducting archaeological research in the Caribbean, directing
projects in Trinidad, Grenada, St. Lucia, Puerto Rico, the
Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, Grand Cayman, the
Turks & Caicos Islands, and throughout the Bahamas. Walking
hundreds of miles of beaches, working without shade in the
Caribbean sun, diving in refreshing and pristine waters, and
studying the people and natural environment around them has
given them insights into the lifeways of the people who lived
in the Caribbean before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
Sadly, harsh treatment extinguished the culture that we today
call Taíno or Arawak.
In an effort to repay their debt to the past and the
present, the authors have focused on the relationship between
the Taínos of the past (revealed through archaeological
investigations) and the present natural history of the islands.
Bringing the past to life and highlighting commonalities
between past and present, they emphasize Taíno words and
beliefs about their worldview and culture.
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