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Patrisia Gonzales addresses \"Red Medicine\" as a system of healing that includes birthing practices, dreaming, and purification rites to re-establish personal and social equilibrium. The book explores Indigenous medicine across North America, with a special emphasis on how Indigenous knowledge has endured and persisted among peoples with a legacy to Mexico. Gonzales combines her lived experience inRed Medicineas an herbalist and traditional birth attendant ith in-depth research into oral traditions, storytelling, and the meanings of symbols to uncover how Indigenous knowledge endures over time. And she shows how this knowledge is now being reclaimed by Chicanos, Mexican Americans and Mexican Indigenous peoples.For Gonzales, a central guiding force in Red Medicine is the principal of regeneration as it is manifested in Spiderwoman. Dating to Pre-Columbian times, the Mesoamerican Weaver/Spiderwoman--the guardian of birth, medicine, and purification rites such as the Nahua sweat bath--exemplifies the interconnected process of rebalancing that transpires throughout life in mental, spiritual and physical manifestations. Gonzales also explains how dreaming is a form of diagnosing in traditional Indigenous medicine and how Indigenous concepts of the body provide insight into healing various kinds of trauma.Gonzales links pre-Columbian thought to contemporary healing practices by examining ancient symbols and their relation to current curative knowledges among Indigenous peoples.Red Medicinesuggests that Indigenous healing systems can usefully point contemporary people back to ancestral teachings and help them reconnect to the dynamics of the natural world.

Indigenous communities around the world are gathering to both reclaim and share their ancestral wisdom. Aware of and drawing from these social movements, A Clan Mother's Call articulates Haudenosaunee women's worldview that honors women, clanship, and the earth. Over successive generations, First Nation people around the globe have experienced and survived trauma and colonization. Extensive literature documents these assaults, but few record their resilience. This book fulfills an urgent and unmet need for First Nation women to share their historical and cultural memory as a people. It is a need invoked and proclaimed by Clan Mother, Iakoiane Wakerahkats:teh, of the Mohawk Nation. Utilizing ethnographic methods of participatory observation, interviewing and recording oral history, the book is an important and useful resource for capturing \"living\" histories. It strengthens the cultural bridge and understanding of the Haudenosaunee people within the United States and Canada.

Rights Rememberedis a remarkable historical narrative and autobiography written by esteemed Lummi elder and culture bearer Pauline R. Hillaire, Scälla-Of the Killer Whale. A direct descendant of the immediate postcontact generation of Coast Salish in Washington State, Hillaire combines in her narrative life experiences, Lummi oral traditions preserved and passed on to her, and the written record of relationships between the United States and the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast to tell the story of settlers, government officials, treaties, reservations, and the colonial relationship between Coast Salish and the white newcomers.Hillaire's autobiography, although written out of frustration with the status of Native peoples in America, is not an expression of anger but rather represents, in her own words, her hope \"for greater justice for Indian people in America, and for reconciliation between Indian and non-Indian Americans, based on recognition of the truths of history.\"Addressed to indigenous and non-Native peoples alike, this is a thoughtful call for understanding and mutual respect between cultures.

Ruth M. Underhill (1883-1984) was one of the twentieth century's legendary anthropologists, forged in the same crucible as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. After decades of trying to escape her Victorian roots, Underhill took on a new adventure at the age of forty-six, when she entered Columbia University as a doctoral student of anthropology. Celebrated now as one of America's pioneering anthropologists, Underhill reveals her life's journey in frank, tender, unvarnished revelations that form the basis of An Anthropologist's Arrival. This memoir, edited by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Stephen E. Nash, is based on unpublished archives, including an unfinished autobiography and interviews conducted prior to her death, held by the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.In brutally honest words, Underhill describes her uneven passage through life, beginning with a searing portrait of the Victorian restraints on women and her struggle to break free from her Quaker family's privileged but tightly laced control. Tenderly and with humor she describes her transformation from a struggling \"sweet girl\" to wife and then divorcée. Professionally she became a welfare worker, a novelist, a frustrated bureaucrat at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a professor at the University of Denver, and finally an anthropologist of distinction.Her witty memoir reveals the creativity and tenacity that pushed the bounds of ethnography, particularly through her focus on the lives of women, for whom she served as a role model, entering a working retirement that lasted until she was nearly 101 years old.No quotation serves to express Ruth Underhill's adventurous view better than a line from her own poetry: \"Life is not paid for. Life is lived. Now come.\"

In this extraordinary book Josephine Peters, a respected northern California Indian elder and Native healer, shares her vast, lifelong cultural and plant knowledge. The book begins with Josephine's personal and tribal history and gathering ethics. Josephine then instructs the reader in medicinal and plant food preparations and offers an illustrated catalog of the uses and doses of over 160 plants. At a time of the commercialization of traditional ecological knowledge, Peters presents her rich tradition on her own terms, and according to her spiritual convictions about how her knowledge should be shared. This volume is essential for anyone working in ethnobotany, ethnomedicine, environmental anthropology, Native American studies, and Western and California culture and history.

The story of the Tohono O'odham peoples offers an important account of assimilation. Bifurcated by a border demarcating Mexico and the United States that was imposed on them after the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, the Tohono O'odham lived at the edge of two empires. Although they were often invisible to the majority cultures of the region, they attracted the attention of reformers and government officials in the United States, who were determined to \"assimilate\" native peoples into \"American society.\" By focusing on gender norms and ideals in the assimilation of the Tohono O'odham,At the Border of Empiresprovides a lens for looking at both Native American history and broader societal ideas about femininity, masculinity, and empire around the turn of the twentieth century.Beginning in the 1880s, the US government implemented programs to eliminate \"vice\" among the Tohono O'odham and to encourage the morals of the majority culture as the basis of a process of \"Americanization.\" During the next fifty years, tribal norms interacted with-sometimes conflicting with and sometimes reinforcing-those of the larger society in ways that significantly shaped both government policy and tribal experience. This book examines the mediation between cultures, the officials who sometimes developed policies based on personal beliefs and gender biases, and the native people whose lives were impacted as a result. These issues are brought into useful relief by comparing the experiences of the Tohono O'odham on two sides of a border that was, from a native perspective, totally arbitrary.

As cultural mediators, Chamelco's market women offer a model of contemporary Q'eqchi' identity grounded in the strength of the Maya historical legacy. Guatemala's Maya communities have faced nearly five hundred years of constant challenges to their culture, from colonial oppression to the instability of violent military dictatorships and the advent of new global technologies. In spite of this history, the people of San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala, have effectively resisted significant changes to their cultural identities. Chamelco residents embrace new technologies, ideas, and resources to strengthen their indigenous identities and maintain Maya practice in the 21st century, a resilience that sets Chamelco apart from other Maya towns. Unlike the region's other indigenous women, Chamelco's Q'eqchi' market women achieve both prominence and visibility as vendors, dominating social domains from religion to local politics. These women honor their families' legacies through continuation of the inherited, high-status marketing trade. In Maya Market Women, S. Ashley Kistler describes how market women gain social standing as mediators of sometimes conflicting realities, harnessing the forces of global capitalism to revitalize Chamelco's indigenous identity. Working at the intersections of globalization, kinship, gender, and memory, Kistler presents a firsthand look at Maya markets as a domain in which the values of capitalism and indigenous communities meet.

A Nation of Womenchronicles changing ideas of gender and identity among the Delaware Indians from the mid-seventeenth through the eighteenth century, as they encountered various waves of migrating peoples in their homelands along the eastern coast of North America. In Delaware society at the beginning of this period, to be a woman meant to engage in the activities performed by women, including diplomacy, rather than to be defined by biological sex. Among the Delaware, being a \"woman\" was therefore a self-identification, employed by both women and men, that reflected the complementary roles of both sexes within Delaware society. For these reasons, the Delaware were known among Europeans and other Native American groups as \"a nation of women.\" Decades of interaction with these other cultures gradually eroded the positive connotations of being a nation of women as well as the importance of actual women in Delaware society. In Anglo-Indian politics, being depicted as a woman suggested weakness and evil. Exposed to such thinking, Delaware men struggled successfully to assume the formal speaking roles and political authority that women once held. To salvage some sense of gender complementarity in Delaware society, men and women redrew the lines of their duties more rigidly. As the era came to a close, even as some Delaware engaged in a renewal of Delaware identity as a masculine nation, others rejected involvement in Christian networks that threatened to disturb the already precarious gender balance in their social relations. Drawing on all available European accounts, including those in Swedish, German, and English, Fur establishes the centrality of gender in Delaware life and, in doing so, argues for a new understanding of how different notions of gender influenced all interactions in colonial North America.

We are all caught up in one another, Scott Lauria Morgensen asserts, we who live in settler societies, and our interrelationships inform all that these societies touch. Native people live in relation to all non-Natives amid the ongoing power relations of settler colonialism, despite never losing inherent claims to sovereignty as indigenous peoples. Explaining how relational distinctions of “Native” and “settler” define the status of being “queer,” Spaces between Us argues that modern queer subjects emerged among Natives and non-Natives by engaging the meaningful difference indigeneity makes within a settler society. Morgensen’s analysis exposes white settler colonialism as a primary condition for the development of modern queer politics in the United States. Bringing together historical and ethnographic cases, he shows how U.S. queer projects became non-Native and normatively white by comparatively examining the historical activism and critical theory of Native queer and Two-Spirit people. Presenting a “biopolitics of settler colonialism”—in which the imagined disappearance of indigeneity and sustained subjugation of all racialized peoples ensures a progressive future for white settlers— Spaces between Us newly demonstrates the interdependence of nation, race, gender, and sexuality and offers opportunities for resistance in the United States.

What was the New World like before it encountered the Old? Now, scientific expeditions in North and South America are woven with drama recreations to investigate and present a new vision of America, and how the clash of civilizations forever altered the history of our world. Episode 3: Native women are leading, innovating and inspiring in the arts, politics and protecting the planet. NATIVE AMERICA explores the diverse ways they carry forward deep traditions to better their communities, their lands and the world.