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Who counts as an American Indian? Which groups qualify as Indian tribes? These questions have become increasingly complex in the past several decades, and federal legislation and the rise of tribal-owned casinos have raised the stakes in the ongoing debate. In this revealing study, historian Mark Edwin Miller describes how and why dozens of previously unrecognized tribal groups in the southeastern states have sought, and sometimes won, recognition, often to the dismay of the Five Tribes—the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. Miller explains how politics, economics, and such slippery issues as tribal and racial identity drive the conflicts between federally recognized tribal entities like the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and other groups such as the Southeastern Cherokee Confederacy that also seek sovereignty. Battles over which groups can claim authentic Indian identity are fought both within the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Federal Acknowledgment Process and in Atlanta, Montgomery, and other capitals where legislators grant state recognition to Indian-identifying enclaves without consulting federally recognized tribes with similar names. Miller’s analysis recognizes the arguments on all sides—both the scholars and activists who see tribal affiliation as an individual choice, and the tribal governments that view unrecognized tribes as fraudulent. Groups such as the Lumbees, the Lower Muscogee Creeks, and the Mowa Choctaws, inspired by the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty, have evolved in surprising ways, as have traditional tribal governments. Describing the significance of casino gambling, the leader of one unrecognized group said, “It’s no longer a matter of red; it’s a matter of green.” Either a positive or a negative development, depending on who is telling the story, the casinos’ economic impact has clouded what were previously issues purely of law, ethics, and justice. Drawing on both documents and personal interviews, Miller unravels the tangled politics of Indian identity and sovereignty. His lively, clearly argued book will be vital reading for tribal leaders, policy makers, and scholars.
A wide-ranging and truly interdisciplinary guide to understanding the relationship between India's colonial past and globalized present.
Discusses the failure of America's political elites to recognize how group identities drive politics both at home and abroad, and outlines recommendations for reversing the country's foreign policy failures and overcoming destructive political tribalism at home.
The border region of the Sonoran Desert, which spans southern Arizona in the United States and northern Sonora, Mexico, has attracted national and international attention. But what is less discussed in national discourses is the impact of current border policies on the Native peoples of the region. There are twenty-six tribal nations recognized by the U.S. federal government in the southern border region and approximately eight groups of Indigenous peoples in the United States with historical ties to Mexico—the Yaqui, the O’odham, the Cocopah, the Kumeyaay, the Pai, the Apaches, the Tiwa (Tigua), and the Kickapoo. Divided Peoples addresses the impact border policies have on traditional lands and the peoples who live there—whether environmental degradation, border patrol harassment, or the disruption of traditional ceremonies. Anthropologist Christina Leza shows how such policies affect the traditional cultural survival of Indigenous peoples along the border. The author examines local interpretations and uses of international rights tools by Native activists, counterdiscourse on the U.S.-Mexico border, and challenges faced by Indigenous border activists when communicating their issues to a broader public. Through ethnographic research with grassroots Indigenous activists in the region, the author reveals several layers of division—the division of Indigenous peoples by the physical U.S.-Mexico border, the divisions that exist between Indigenous perspectives and mainstream U.S. perspectives regarding the border, and the traditionalist/nontraditionalist split among Indigenous nations within the United States. Divided Peoples asks us to consider the possibilities for challenging settler colonialism both in sociopolitical movements and in scholarship about Indigenous peoples and lands.
Shadow Tribe offers the first in-depth history of the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia River Indians -- the defiant River People whose ancestors refused to settle on the reservations established for them in central Oregon and Washington. Largely overlooked in traditional accounts of tribal dispossession and confinement, their story illuminates the persistence of off-reservation Native communities and the fluidity of their identities over time. Cast in the imperfect light of federal policy and dimly perceived by non-Indian eyes, the flickering presence of the Columbia River Indians has followed the treaty tribes down the difficult path marked out by the forces of American colonization. Based on more than a decade of archival research and conversations with Native people, Andrew Fisher’s groundbreaking book traces the waxing and waning of Columbia River Indian identity from the mid-nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Fisher explains how, despite policies designed to destroy them, the shared experience of being off the reservation and at odds with recognized tribes forged far-flung river communities into a loose confederation called the Columbia River Tribe. Environmental changes and political pressures eroded their autonomy during the second half of the twentieth century, yet many River People continued to honor a common heritage of ancestral connection to the Columbia, resistance to the reservation system, devotion to cultural traditions, and detachment from the institutions of federal control and tribal governance. At times, their independent and uncompromising attitude has challenged the sovereignty of the recognized tribes, earning Columbia River Indians a reputation as radicals and troublemakers even among their own people. Shadow Tribe is part of a new wave of historical scholarship that shows Native American identities to be socially constructed, layered, and contested rather than fixed, singular, and unchanging. From his vantage point on the Columbia, Fisher has written a pioneering study that uses regional history to broaden our understanding of how Indians thwarted efforts to confine and define their existence within narrow reservation boundaries.
The reported population of American Indians and Alaska Natives has grown rapidly over the past 20 years. These changes raise questions for the Indian Health Service and other agencies responsible for serving the American Indian population. How big is the population? What are its health care and insurance needs? This volume presents an up-to-date summary of what is known about the demography of American Indian and Alaska Native populationâ€"their age and geographic distributions, household structure, employment, and disability and disease patterns. This information is critical for health care planners who must determine the eligible population for Indian health services and the costs of providing them. The volume will also be of interest to researchers and policymakers concerned about the future characteristics and needs of the American Indian population.
This single-volume book contends that reshaping the paradigm of American Indian identity, blood quantum, and racial distinctions can positively impact the future of the Indian community within America and America itself. This academic compendium examines the complexities associated with Indian identity in North America, including the various social, political, and legal issues impacting Indian expression in different periods; the European influence on how self-governing tribal communities define the rights of citizenship within their own communities; and the effect of Indian mascots, Thanksgiving, and other cultural appropriations taking place within American society on the Indian community. The book looks at and proposes solutions to the controversies surrounding the Indian tribal nations and their people. The authors—all leading advocates of Indian progress—argue that tribal governments and communities should reconsider the notion of what comprises Indian identity, and in doing so, they compare and contrast how indigenous people around the world define themselves and their communities. Chapters address complex questions under the discourse of Indian law, history, philosophy, education, political science, anthropology, art, psychology, and civil rights. Topics covered in depth include blood quantum, racial distinctions, First Nations, and tribal citizenship.
Who is a Native American? And who gets to decide? From genealogists searching online for their ancestors to fortune hunters hoping for a slice of casino profits from wealthy tribes, the answers to these seemingly straightforward questions have profound ramifications. The rise of DNA testing has further complicated the issues and raised the stakes. In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful—and problematic—scientific process that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic information in a web of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules, and government regulations. At a larger level, TallBear asserts, the “markers” that are identified and applied to specific groups such as Native American tribes bear the imprints of the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, and even tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them. TallBear notes that ideas about racial science, which informed white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century laboratories. Because today’s science seems so compelling, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: “in our blood” is giving way to “in our DNA.” This rhetorical drift, she argues, has significant consequences, and ultimately she shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously—and permanently—undermined.
US AND THEM: Understanding your tribal mind reveals how and why we convince ourselves that we belong to differing human kinds - tribe-type categories like races, religions, classes, street gangs and high school cliques. Why do we see these divisions? Why do we care about them so much? Why do we kill and die for them? We see it every day on the news. Why have high schools in the US become killing zones? Why does strife continue in Northern Ireland? How do terrorists learn to torture and kill anyone who isn't one of them? Members Only answers these questions by looking at their common root in human nature. Politics and culture are invoked, of course, but the heart of the book is the individual mind. David Berreby describes how each person creates their own mind map, identifies others with similar mind maps and ostracises all those who are different. Based in solid scientific research, David Berreby exposes new discoveries about the mind and brain that will eventually overturn many of our familiar notions about human kinds and how we perceive them. This is a crucial subject that touches all of our lives in ways both large and small, obvious and subtle. Human kind thinking is part of human nature.
Though not as well known as the U.S. military campaigns against the Apache, the ethnic warfare conducted against indigenous people of the Colorado River basin was equally devastating. In less than twenty-five years after first encountering Anglos, the Hualapais had lost more than half their population and nearly all their land and found themselves consigned to a reservation. This book focuses on the historical construction of the Hualapai Nation in the face of modern American colonialism. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and participant observation, Jeffrey Shepherd describes how thirteen bands of extended families known as The Pai confronted American colonialism and in the process recast themselves as a modern Indigenous nation. Shepherd shows that Hualapai nation-building was a complex process shaped by band identities, competing visions of the past, creative reactions to modernity, and resistance to state power. He analyzes how the Hualapais transformed an externally imposed tribal identity through nationalist discourses of protecting aboriginal territory; and he examines how that discourse strengthened the Hualapais’ claim to land and water while simultaneously reifying a politicized version of their own history. Along the way, he sheds new light on familiar topics—Indian–white conflict, the creation of tribal government, wage labor, federal policy, and Native activism—by applying theories of race, space, historical memory, and decolonization. Drawing on recent work in American Indian history and Native American studies, Shepherd shows how the Hualapai have strived to reclaim a distinct identity and culture in the face of ongoing colonialism. We Are an Indian Nation is grounded in Hualapai voices and agendas while simultaneously situating their history in the larger tapestry of Native peoples’ confrontations with colonialism and modernity.