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In the Dene worldview, relationships form the foundation of a distinct way of knowing. For the Tlicho Dene, indigenous peoples of Canada's Northwest Territories, as stories from the past unfold as experiences in the present, so unfolds a philosophy for the future. Walking the Land, Feeding the Fire vividly shows how—through stories and relationships with all beings—Tlicho knowledge is produced and rooted in the land. Tlicho-speaking people are part of the more widespread Athapaskan-speaking community, which spans the western sub-arctic and includes pockets in British Columbia, Alberta, California, and Arizona. Anthropologist Allice Legat undertook this work at the request of Tlicho Dene community elders, who wanted to provide younger Tlicho with narratives that originated in the past but provide a way of thinking through current critical land-use issues. Legat illustrates that, for the Tlicho Dene, being knowledgeable and being of the land are one and the same. Walking the Land, Feeding the Fire marks the beginning of a new era of understanding, drawing both connections to and unique aspects of ways of knowing among other Dene peoples, such as the Western Apache. As Keith Basso did with his studies among the Western Apache in earlier decades, Legat sets a new standard for research by presenting Dene perceptions of the environment and the personal truths of the storytellers without forcing them into scientific or public-policy frameworks. Legat approaches her work as a community partner—providing a powerful methodology that will impact the way research is conducted for decades to come—and provides unique insights and understandings available only through traditional knowledge.
This edited book brings together leading scholars in the field of Indigenous religions working with Indigenous Peoples from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe to examine various Indigenous discourses, practices, and politics of movement, as they intersect with issues of religion and spirituality. Indigenous Peoples and their religious traditions have always been mobile and adaptive. Scholars of Indigenous religions have tended to focus their theories of Indigeneity and religion on Indigenous Peoples’ cultural and historic connections to particular land-bases, not always attending to the full complexity of Indigenous Peoples’ mobile lived realities. Attention to mobility within the study of Indigenous religions reveals the many ways Indigenous religions, in addition to being grounded on the land and situated in shared pasts, are expansive, relational, innovative, and future oriented. The contributions to this volume highlight the centrality of mobility to cultivating personhood, maintaining networks of affinity and belonging, fostering political alliances and solidarities, and generating religious meaning. This book will be a key resource for scholars and students in the fields of religious studies, Indigenous studies, anthropology, and history, as well as to a broad general audience interested in larger questions around the politics of decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, and self-determination. It was originally published as a special issue of Material Religion.
Popularly thought of as a recreational vehicle and one of the key ingredients of an ideal wilderness getaway, the canoe is also a political vessel. A potent symbol and practice of Indigenous cultures and traditions, the canoe has also been adopted to assert conservation ideals, feminist empowerment, citizenship practices, and multicultural goals. Documenting many of these various uses, this book asserts that the canoe is not merely a matter of leisure and pleasure; it is folded into many facets of our political life. Taking a critical stance on the canoe, The Politics of the Canoe expands and enlarges the stories that we tell about the canoe’s relationship to, for example, colonialism, nationalism, environmentalism, and resource politics. To think about the canoe as a political vessel is to recognize how intertwined canoes are in the public life, governance, authority, social conditions, and ideologies of particular cultures, nations, and states. Almost everywhere we turn, and any way we look at it, the canoe both affects and is affected by complex political and cultural histories. Across Canada and the U.S., canoeing cultures have been born of activism and resistance as much as of adherence to the mythologies of wilderness and nation building. The essays in this volume show that canoes can enhance how we engage with and interpret not only our physical environments, but also our histories and present-day societies.
This book is based upon more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork and personal experiences with the Teetł’it Gwich’in community in northern Canada. The author provides insight into Gwich’in understandings of life as well as into historical and political processes that have taken place in the North. He outlines the development of an educational approach towards conducting ethnography and writing anthropological literature, starting with the premise ‘you have to live it’. The book focuses on ways of knowing and collaboration through learning and being taught by interlocutors. Building on the work of Tim Ingold, Loovers investigates the notion of reading life - land, water and weather as well as texts – and analyses the reading of texts as acts of conversations or correspondences.
This book examines ways of conserving, managing, and interacting with plant and animal resources by Native American cultural groups of the Pacific Coast of North America, from Alaska to California. These practices helped them maintain and restore ecological balance for thousands of years. Building upon the authors’ and others’ previous works, the book brings in perspectives from ethnography and marine evolutionary ecology. The core of the book consists of Native American testimony: myths, tales, speeches, and other texts, which are treated from an ecological viewpoint. The focus on animals and in-depth research on stories, especially early recordings of texts, set this book apart. The book is divided into two parts, covering the Northwest Coast, and California. It then follows the division in lifestyle between groups dependent largely on fish and largely on seed crops. It discusses how the survival of these cultures functions in the contemporary world, as First Nations demand recognition and restoration of their ancestral rights and resource management practices.
Religion and Culture in Native America presents an introduction to a diverse array of Indigenous religious and cultural practices in North America, focusing on those issues in which tribal communities themselves are currently invested. These topics include climate change, water rights, the protection of sacred places, the reclaiming of Indigenous foods, health and wellness, social justice, and the safety of Indigenous women and girls. Locating such contemporary challenges within their historical, religious, and cultural contexts illuminates how Native communities' responses to such issues are not simply political, but deeply spiritual, informed by sacred traditions, ethical principles, and profound truths. In collaboration with renowned ethnographer and scholar of Native American religious traditions Inés Talamantez, Suzanne Crawford O'Brien abandons classical categories typically found in religious studies textbooks and challenges essentialist notions of Native American cultures to explore the complexities of Native North American life. Key features of this text include: Consideration of Indigenous religious traditions within their historical, political, and cultural contexts Thematic organization emphasizing the concerns and commitments of contemporary tribal communities Maps and images that help to locate tribal communities and illustrate key themes. Recommendations for further reading and research Written in an engaging narrative style, this book makes an ideal text for undergraduate courses in Native American Religions, Religion and Ecology, Indigenous Religions, and World Religions.
Contemporary public discourses about the ocean are routinely characterized by scientific and environmentalist narratives that imagine and idealize marine spaces in which humans are absent. In contrast, this collection explores the variety of ways in which people have long made themselves at home at sea, and continue to live intimately with it. In doing so, it brings together both ethnographic and archaeological research – much of it with an explicit Ingoldian approach – on a wide range of geographical areas and historical periods.
“You don’t have to use the exact same words.... But it has to mean exactly what I said.” Thus began the ten-year collaboration between Innu elder and activist Tshaukuesh Elizabeth Penashue and Memorial University professor Elizabeth Yeoman that produced the celebrated Nitinikiau Innusi: I Keep the Land Alive, an English-language edition of Penashue’s journals, originally written in Innu-aimun during her decades of struggle for Innu sovereignty. Exactly What I Said: Translating Words and Worlds reflects on that collaboration and what Yeoman learned from it. It is about naming, mapping, and storytelling; about photographs, collaborative authorship, and voice; about walking together on the land and what can be learned along the way. Combining theory with personal narrative, Yeoman weaves together ideas, memories, and experiences––of home and place, of stories and songs, of looking and listening––to interrogate the challenges and ethics of translation. Examining what it means to relate whole worlds across the boundaries of language, culture, and history, Exactly What I Said offers an accessible, engaging reflection on respectful and responsible translation and collaboration.
Twentieth-century circumpolar epidemics shaped historical interpretations of disease in European imperialism in the Americas and beyond. In this revisionist history of epidemic disease as experienced by northern peoples, Liza Piper illuminates the ecological, spatial, and colonial relationships that allowed diseases – influenza, measles, and tuberculosis in particular – to flourish between 1860 and 1940 along the Mackenzie and Yukon rivers. Making detailed use of Indigenous oral histories alongside English and French language archives and emphasising environmental alongside social and cultural factors, When Disease Came to this Country shows how colonial ideas about northern Indigenous immunity to disease were rooted in the racialized structures of colonialism that transformed northern Indigenous lives and lands, and shaped mid-twentieth century biomedical research.