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Throughout Oceania, land is central to identity because it is understood to be spiritually nourishing and sustaining. Land is the mother. Land, and the kinship it nurtures, is the basis for sustaining livelihoods and ways of life. Therefore, Indigenous dispossession from the land has deep and far-reaching consequences. My Land, My Life: Dispossession at the Frontier of Desire explores the land rush that took place in Vanuatu from 2001 to 2014 which resulted in over ten percent of all customary land being leased. In this book, Siobhan McDonnell offers new insights into the drivers of capitalist land transformations. Using multi-scalar and multi-sited ethnography, she describes not simply a linear march toward commodification of the landscape by foreign interests, but a complex web replete with the local powerful Indigenous men involved in manipulating power and property. McDonnell meticulously describes land-leasing processes and maps the relationships between investors, middlemen, and local men. She shows how property is a tool with which foreigners reassert capitalism and neocolonial control over Indigenous landscapes. The legal identity of “landowner” contains foundational contradictions between the rights established in Vanuatu’s kastom system and those afforded by property, as individualized rights over land. Property has also created sites for the production of masculine authority and enabled men to manipulate claims to land and entrench their personal power. This book explores how transactions of customary land have created new domains of agency and frontiers of desire: foreign desire to possess land and local desire to lease land for cash. It concludes with a discussion of Vanuatu’s constitutional and land reform package, drafted by the author, which took effect in 2014 and delivered a more empathetic approach to Indigenous land rights and ended the land rush. Informed by decades of study, legal work, and community engagement, My Land, My Life demonstrates an engaged anthropological practice based on reciprocity that responds directly to what Indigenous people have asked for. This book is certain to appeal to a wide range of scholars as well as policy makers.
The political, cultural, and socioeconomic struggles of Alaska's Native peoples have a long and difficult history of local, national, and even international import. In two volumes, Donald Craig Mitchell offers a new level of historical detail in this readable account of the political and legal dimensions of Alaska Native land claims through 1971. Sold American is an account of the history of the federal government's relationship with Alaska's Indian, Eskimo, and Aleut peoples, from the United States' purchase of Alaska from the czar of Russia in 1867 to Alaska statehood in 1959. Mitchell describes how, from eighteenth-century the arrival of Russian sea otter hunters in the Aleutian Islands to the present day, Alaska Natives have participated in the efforts of non-Natives to turn Alaska's bountiful natural resources into dollars, and documents how Alaska Natives, non-Natives, and the society they jointly forged have been changed because of this process. Take My Land, Take My Life concludes thatstory by describing the events that in 1971 resulted in Congress's enactment of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Together, these volumes interpret a 134-year history of relations between the federal and state governments and Alaska Natives. Mitchell's story of the rise of new forms of Alaska Native political leadership culminates in the territorial and monetary settlement that, while highly controversial, has provided crucial lessons and precedents for indigenous legal and political actions world wide. Particularly intriguing from his painstaking research in Congressional records are Mitchell's portraits of important players in the Alaska Federation of Natives and the federal government asthey battle for power in subcommittees of Congress. Detailed and provocative, Mitchell'
For the past 16 years, Cadillac Man (so named because he was once hit by an El Dorado and thereafter bore an imprint of its hood ornament) has lived on the streets of New York City. Over those years, he has recorded the facts of his daily life - the harsh realities of surviving on the street, the often tragic encounters with the non-homeless world, the deep bonds with his fellow homeless, and the surprisingly varied realities of life on the outside - writing hundreds of thousands of words in a series of spiral bound notebooks. "My Life in the Streets" distills those journals into a memoir of homeless life that is peopled with indelible characters and packed with gripping stories. In a gritty, poignant, and funny voice, Cadillac narrates his descent into homelessness, the travails and unexpected freedoms of his life, and the story of his love affair with a young runaway, whom he eventually (and tragically) reunites with her family. The United States has 700,000 homeless people; ultimately, Cadillac's story is their story.
Growing up in a small town to me was an adventure. In Bluff, a small town in central Queensland, everyone knew everyone. I had plenty of friends to hang out with. My mates and I were always outside playing and never got home until dark, which I sometimes got a flogging for, but I had fun playing. The school had about five to six buildings in the seventies and eighties but big enough to keep us kids busy. I was raised by my mother along with two older brothers and one younger sister and lots of relatives. On the weekends, we’d go camping down the creek, where our cubby house was or go crawchying (yabbies) for something to eat. Having a childhood gave me a lot of imagination and inspired me to write stories about our adventures and begin to write poetry. This book is mostly about my Aboriginal culture and thoughts and hopefully some poems that the reader can relate to.
In 1949, Rosamond Halsey Carr, a young fashion illustrator living in New York City, accompanied her dashing hunter-explorer husband to what was then the Belgian Congo. When the marriage fell apart, she decided to stay on in neighboring Rwanda, as the manager of a flower plantation. Land of a Thousand Hills is Carr's thrilling memoir of her life in Rwanda—a love affair with a country and a people that has spanned half a century. During those years, she has experienced everything from stalking leopards to rampaging elephants, drought, the mysterious murder of her friend Dian Fossey, and near-bankruptcy. She has chugged up the Congo River on a paddle-wheel steamboat, been serenaded by pygmies, and witnessed firsthand the collapse of colonialism. Following 1994's Hutu-Tutsi genocide, Carr turned her plantation into a shelter for the lost and orphaned children-work she continues to this day, at the age of eighty-seven.
In this inspirational memoir, Grey's Anatomy actor Isaiah Washington explains how filling in the gaps of his past led him to discover a new passion: helping those less fortunate. DNA testing revealed that Washington was descended from the Mende people, who today live in Sierra Leone. For many people, the story would end with the results of the search; for Isaiah, it had just begun. Discovering his roots has given him a new purpose, to lead an inspirational life defined by faith and charity. After visiting Sierra Leone, and researching the country and its needs, Washington forged a strong relationship with the Mende people, and was inducted as Chief Gondobay Manga in May 2006. He established The Gondobay Manga Foundation to institute many improvements suggested by the country's people, addressing educational concerns, practical issues (road building, water supply, and electricity), and rehabilitative projects. Dual citizenship has been a dream of African-Americans such as W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, but Washington became the first to realize that honor in 2008. A twofold milestone, it was also the first time an African president granted citizenship based on DNA.
A wry memoir of growing up, coming out, and going back to the land as a lesbian feminist in the rural Midwest of the 1960s and 70s Dianna Hunter was a softball-loving, working-class tomboy in North Dakota, surviving the threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Mutually Assured Destruction in the shadow of a strategic air command base. Communists and antiwar hippies were the enemy, but lesbians were a threat, too: they were unhealthy, criminal, and downright insane. It took Dianna a while to figure out that she was one, a little longer to discover how she fit in with her new communities in the city and the countryside. This is her story—a frank account by turns comic and painful of a well-behaved Midwestern girl finding her way through polite denial and repression and running head-on into the eye-opening events of the 1960s and ’70s before landing on a dairy farm. A bumpy route takes Dianna to the Twin Cities, then to rural Minnesota and Wisconsin as—by way of the antiwar movement, women’s liberation, and a dose of lesbian feminism—she and her friends try to establish a rural utopia free of sexual oppression, violence, materialism, environmental degradation—and men. They dream big, love as they see fit, and make do until they don’t. Dianna buys a dairy farm and, with it, a new set of problems thanks to the Reagan-era farm crisis. A firsthand account of the lesbian feminist movement at its inception, Wild Mares is a deeply personal, wryly wise, and always engaging view of identity politics lived and learned in real life and, literally, on the ground, flourishing in the fertile soil of a struggling dairy farm in the American heartland.
I still remember the day my father pointed to a huge Mesquite tree about a block from my house where I grew up. As we were walking towards town, he stopped and told me that when he was about twelve years old he found a man hanging from that particular tree. He told me he ran home and brought his dad and a neighbor. I asked him who had done it. He told me that the Texas Rangers had hung him. I was about eight years old. He also told me that I was too young to understand those things but that I would when I got older. As I got older, I continued to hear stories that were similar and then I understood the horror and injustice. Before I die, I feel obligated to share the truth hidden from our history books. I dedicate this short novel in memory of the victims of greedy land grabbers and evil Texas Rangers who committed the atrocities. This story may be categorized as a short novel and fiction. So be it. It is, however, a story of the horrific acts of bigotry, greed, and murder committed in South Texas. May we all follow God's Golden Rule; God Bless
How Native American history can guide us today: “Presents strong voices of old, old cultures bravely trying to make sense of an Earth in chaos.” —Whole Earth Written by a former Green Party vice-presidential candidate who was once listed among “America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty” by Time magazine, this thoughtful, in-depth account of Native struggles against environmental and cultural degradation features chapters on the Seminoles, the Anishinaabeg, the Innu, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Mohawks, among others. Filled with inspiring testimonies of struggles for survival, each page of this volume speaks forcefully for self-determination and community. “Moving and often beautiful prose.” —Ralph Nader “Thoroughly researched and convincingly written.” —Choice