Ethnohistory current issue

Presidential Lecture: Wives and Husbands: Arapaho Gender in Time

Fowler, L. — 2009-09-16

This essay examines the lives of four Arapahos whose experiences are broadly representative of the life-career patterns of their cohorts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that in the American encounter, individuals and groups challenged both American and Arapaho ideas and practices associated with age and gender. Comparison of experiences between and within cohorts shows age- and gender-based strategies, including the "partnering" dimension of gender relations most evident in the wife-husband relation. These multiple strategies shaped Arapaho history.

Land and Succession in the Indigenous Noble Houses of Sixteenth-Century Tlaxcala

Hicks, F. — 2009-09-16

On the eve of the Spanish conquest, and in the decades immediately thereafter, the indigenous population of Tlaxcala, in the Valley of Puebla, east of the Basin of Mexico, was grouped into four kingdoms (tlahtocayotl or altepetl, generally called cabeceras in Spanish) of pre-Hispanic origin. Within each cabecera, the basic social and political units were lordly houses (teccalli), each headed by a lord (teuctli) and including junior nobles and nonnoble commoners who worked the lands of the house and provided it with other services. The proceedings of a number of early colonial legal cases indicate that the lands of a teccalli were of two kinds: collectively held lands of the teccalli as a whole and individually held lands of particular nobles of the house. Collectively held lands were passed down over generations undivided and served to maintain the integrity and power of the house. Individually held lands, which were held by women as well as men, were frequently transferred from one house to another and recombined upon marriage, linking the noble houses; they served to maintain the unity and power of the state as a whole.

Baptism among the Salinan Neophytes of Mission San Antonio de Padua: Investigating the Ecological Hypothesis

Peelo, S. — 2009-09-16

The motivations for relatively rapid incorporation of Native Californian populations into the Spanish mission system are the subject of anthropological and historical debate (e.g., S. Cook 1976; Coombs and Plog 1977; Duggan 2000; Guest 1979; Hackel 2005; Jackson 1999; Larson, Johnson, and Michaelsen 1994; Milliken 1995; Sandos 1991, 1998, 2004). The ecological hypothesis is one of many explanations offered. Advocates of this hypothesis maintain that environmental push factors such as drought, depletion of native food sources by the grazing of livestock, and environmental changes induced by the construction of irrigation systems and pull factors such as the potential food sources provided by the missions were motivating reasons for the rapid incorporation of native peoples into the Spanish mission system of Alta California. This hypothesis has predominantly been used by scholars to explain Chumash baptism in southern California missions (Coombs and Plog 1977; Jackson 1999; Larson, Johnson, and Michaelsen 1994), but has more recently also been used to discuss Esselen and Costanoan/Ohlone baptisms at Mission San Carlos (Hackel 2005). In this paper, I examine the validity of the ecological hypothesis for Salinan Indian baptism at Mission San Antonio de Padua using documentary and archaeological evidence. Salinan Indians at Mission San Antonio were influenced by only some environmental push and pull factors, and only at specific times during this culture contact period. As economics, culture, and environment changed through time at Mission San Antonio, the reasons that Salinan peoples chose baptism may also have been dynamic. This conclusion emphasizes that the reasons Native Californians chose baptism are geographically, temporally, and culturally contingent.

Glimpsing Native American Historiography: The Cellular Principle in Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Annals

Townsend, C. — 2009-09-16

This article argues that if we are to make progress in understanding pre-conquest notions of history among the Nahuas, we must study the earliest alphabetic annals at least as seriously as we have studied the pictorials, including not only those treating the pre-conquest period, but also those treating the authors' own times, the colonial sixteenth century. Placing the hitherto understudied Annals of Juan Bautista and Annals of Tecamachalco in the context of the well-studied Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, Annals of Cuauhtitlan, and Codex Aubin, the author concludes that there is direct evidence that Nahuatl historical annals originally were not, as has been supposed, purely linear texts recounting the history of a single altepetl, but rather, constructions based on an accumulation of cellular contributions from multiple subentities. Historical truth was understood to require multiple perspectives.

Penn's Peaceable Kingdom: Shangri-la Revisited

Marsh, D. — 2009-09-16

The history of indigenous Pennsylvania and William Penn's peaceable kingdom is often considered an exception to the standard narrative of violence, dispossession, and conquest in the broader account of colonial North America. The story of Hannah Freeman, a Lenape woman who lived in the Quaker colony, counters that standard narrative, despite the best efforts of regional and state historians to offer Hannah Freeman as an artifact of Penn's benevolent conquest. This essay examines that process of commemoration relative to Freeman's life in southeastern Pennsylvania.

The Creation of Indigenous Leadership in a Spanish Town: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1609-1752

Murillo, D. V. — 2009-09-16

This article discusses the creation and evolution of indigenous government in the colonial silver-mining town of Zacatecas. Initially, nonnoble native migrants from central and western Mexico constituted the basis of the city's indigenous population. Living in informal settlements on the outskirts of town, indigenous communities possessed no hereditary leaders and few vehicles for redress and governance. Over time, the city's indigenous groups adopted the Spanish cabildo (municipal council) and established four juridically autonomous Indian towns. This article considers how the development of indigenous cabildos in Zacatecas unified the city's disparate ethnic groups, converted Indian settlements into formal sociopolitical entities, created an official leadership class, and contributed to the perpetuation of a corporate indigenous identity within the city through the late colonial period.

"You See Your Culture Coming Out of the Ground Like a Power": Uncanny Narratives in Time and Space on the Northwest Coast

Boyd, C. E. — 2009-09-16

In 2003, construction began on a graving dock that would bring marine projects to the Olympic Peninsula and provide family-wage jobs. It appeared to be a good fit for the city of Port Angeles, Washington, and its surrounding communities. Shortly after construction began, workers unearthed an approximately 2,700–year-old Coast Salish village and cemetery, claimed by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe as an ancestral site. Significantly, indigenous reports of being haunted by the spirits of their disturbed ancestors and nonnative desires to bury the past and move forward resulted in intercultural conflicts and misunderstandings. Such struggles speak to the contested nature of history and the deeply rooted concerns about the region's socioeconomic future following the decline of natural resource industries.

Bolivia: Tracing the Roots of a Social Movement State

Shih, T.-A. — 2009-09-16

Memory and Method: New Studies on Chilean History

Bruey, A. J. — 2009-09-16

Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica

Lovell, W. G. — 2009-09-16

Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550-1650

Schwaller, J. F. — 2009-09-16

The Agrarian Dispute: The Expropriation of American-Owned Rural Land in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Rugeley, T. — 2009-09-16

Kitchenspace: Women, Fiestas, and Everyday Life in Central Mexico

Stross, B. — 2009-09-16

Brothers among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580-1660

Oberg, M. L. — 2009-09-16

New Histories for Old: Changing Perspectives on Canada's Native Pasts

Podruchny, C. — 2009-09-16

The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915

McCallum, M. J. L. — 2009-09-16

Becoming Tsimshian: The Social Life of Names

Anderson, M. S. — 2009-09-16

In Contact: Bodies and Spaces in the Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Eastern Woodlands

McCullen, M. — 2009-09-16

To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast

Mandell, D. R. — 2009-09-16

Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880

Stebbins, S. — 2009-09-16

Enduring Nations: Native Americans in the Midwest

Rinehart, M. A. — 2009-09-16

The Nez Perces in the Indian Territory: Nimiipuu Survival

Tovias, B. — 2009-09-16

The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco

Farris, G. J. — 2009-09-16

Abalone Tales: Collaborative Explorations of Sovereignty and Identity in Native California

Fountain, S. M. — 2009-09-16

War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War

Smith, F. T. — 2009-09-16

Journey to the West: The Alabama and Coushatta Indians

Hensley, T. D. — 2009-09-16

The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South

Oatis, S. — 2009-09-16

La revolte des Natchez

Sayre, G. M. — 2009-09-16