Ethnohistory recent issues

Varro Muorra: The Landscape Significance of Sami Sacred Wooden Objects and Sacrificial Altars

Bergman, I., Ostlund, L., Zackrisson, O., Liedgren, L. — 2008-02-26

Prior to Christianization, initiated by the Swedish Crown and Church during the seventeenth century, the religion of the native Sami people of northern Scandinavia included animistic beliefs centered on animal ceremonialism. The Sami religion evolved in the framework of hunter-gatherer subsistence, and landscapes were laden with religious significance. The authors of this essay seek to highlight the significance of sacrificial sites as ethnic and religious demarcations in times of conflict between Swedish society and the Sami. We focus especially on sacrificial wooden objects as representations of religious space, discussing three sacrificial sites from different periods and representing a geographical gradient. We conclude that wooden sacrificial sites were still frequent and prominent features of the Sami landscape during the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century in northern Sweden. However, in the following century, the indigenous religion was forced into secrecy. Today, elements of indigenous religious space, as indicated by place names and oral traditions, reflect but fragments of a landscape that was once a coherent whole.

Women "Living across the Line": Intermarriage on the Canadian Prairies and in Southern New Zealand, 1870-1900

Wanhalla, A. — 2008-02-26

During the late nineteenth century reserve lines and boundaries were sharply drawn in Canada and New Zealand, and, as a consequence, the choice to marry "out" had very real material implications for aboriginal women. This article examines the "reserve experience" of indigenous women in Canada and New Zealand, focusing on the native reserve as a significant site of interracial contact. Native reserves were designed to be distinct settlements, but intermarriage undermined the pretense of separate living spaces that reserves were designed to generate. Intermarriage, and the spatial relocation that followed, are significant components of the reserve experience for indigenous women over the period 1870 to 1900. Understanding of the reserve experience requires reorientation to account for spatial movement and migration, viewing the reserve not just as a bounded space, but also as a site where border crossings and resistances took place and where interracial relationships flourished.

The Importance of Initiatory Ordeals: Kinship and Politics in an Inca Narrative

Yaya, I. — 2008-02-26

Among all the Inca sovereigns whose memory had been preserved by the Spanish chroniclers, Yahuar Huacac holds a unique position. He is famed for having shed tears of blood as a child when a foreign lord kidnapped and maltreated him. Surprisingly, his sufferings ended with matrimonial alliances binding the Inca and the main actors of this drama, all important figures of three foreign chiefdoms. Through both a historical and an anthropological approach, this article analyzes the narrative's structure of interwoven ritual events and kinship patterns. It examines how the stages of the heir's journey over many territories forged a distinctive relationship between the Inca elite and the provincial lords, enlightening the meaning of the final unions.

"A Liberal and Paternal Spirit": Indian Agents and Native Fisheries in Canada

Schreiber, D. — 2008-02-26

In the 1890s native fisheries stood in the way of expanding industrial and sport fisheries in Canada. Federal regulations denied a commercial component to native fisheries, restricted harvesting to designated open seasons, and outlawed the technologically specialized and place-based fisheries on which native communities had depended for millennia. Although fisheries officers enforced these rules, Indian agents—the field workers of the Department of Indian Affairs—were the ones who oversaw day-to-day life in native villages, including the fisheries. This article examines the responses of Indian agents across Canada to an Indian Affairs circular sent in 1897, requesting information about native fisheries. The Indian agents' letters of reply suggest that it was the ordinary confrontations and administrative decisions over fishing spaces, gear, closed seasons, and licenses, rather than the official policies of the Department of Indian Affairs, that worked to redefine native fishing in accordance with settler interests. By extending so-called privileges to native fishers, Indian agents worked to conserve the resource for a settler society and assimilate native fishers into state management practices.

The Politics of Intracommunity Land Conflict in the Late Colonial Andes

Serulnikov, S. — 2008-02-26

The article explores the causes, ideological underpinnings, and political repercussions of land battles among the Pocoata, an ethnic group in the southern Andes, during the eighteenth century. These disputes afford us a glimpse into the competing native concepts of land tenure rights; the array of means, legal and extralegal, Andean and Spanish, of solving conflicts between families and ayllus; and the key role of the ethnic chiefs in the struggles over community boundaries and the distribution of plots among community members. The essay argues that, by underscoring the inability of both native and colonial rulers to handle mounting demographic pressures, the intense process of intraethnic strife contributed to the disruption of rural authority.

"Colonial Incas, A-Z"

Lane, K. — 2008-02-26

The First New Chronicle and Good Government

2008-02-26

Taking Charge: Native American Self-Determination and Federal Indian Policy, 1975-1993

2008-02-26

Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500-1776

Nichols, D. A. — 2008-02-26

Prophets of the Great Spirit: Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern North America

Dowd, G. E. — 2008-02-26

Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade

Vibert, E. — 2008-02-26

The Life and Traditions of the Red Man

Girouard, M. — 2008-02-26

The Penobscot Dance of Resistance: Tradition in the History of a People

Hauptman, L. M. — 2008-02-26

Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West

Anderson, G. C. — 2008-02-26

Making Space on the Western Frontier: Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes

Lewis, D. R. — 2008-02-26

A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813-1814

Ethridge, R. — 2008-02-26

Editor's Introduction

Whitehead, N. L. — 2007-09-25

Guest Editor's Introduction: Swiftly Moving Currents: American Indian History and the Changing Complexity of the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Blackhawk, N. — 2007-09-25

Native American History, Ethnohistory, and Context

Wunder, J. R. — 2007-09-25

"We are not now as we once were": Iowa Indians' Political and Economic Adaptations during U.S. Incorporation

Bernstein, D. — 2007-09-25

The historical legacy of the eastern prairies between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in the 1830s is dominated by a series of violent confrontations between Indians and the U.S. Army. Though the "Black Hawk Wars" involved just a few of the Indians living along the Mississippi River watershed, these conflicts epitomize commonly held understandings of Indian-white relations in the region: a violent clash of cultures in which Indians valiantly, but unsuccessfully, fought against American expansion. Contradicting this binary, Iowa Indian leaders understood that their communities had potentially much to gain from aspects of white expansion. The primary purpose of this article is to look beyond circumscribed definitions of Indian-white relations and to illustrate how the Iowa used an assortment of political, economic, and social tactics to help shape their rapidly changing world. Confronting declining wildlife resources, the Iowa began reshaping their economies toward what they hoped would be a more stable agricultural future while initiating diplomatic relations with American agents to help mitigate recurring and more immediate tensions with powerful Indian adversaries.

The Rituals of Possession: Native Identity and the Invention of Empire in Seventeenth-Century Western North America

Witgen, M. — 2007-09-25

This article examines the social construction of space and identity in the Great Lakes and the western interior of North America. Through analysis of documentary evidence it contrasts the discursive practices of the French empire, which established claims of discovery and possession, with the lived experience of the French fur trade and alliance system. It suggests that the practices of empire, such as renaming people and places and then mapping the newly imagined entities both cartographically and through diplomatic protocol, represented native peoples from an exclusively imperial vantage point. This overly determined perspective obscures the extent to which native social formations in the Great Lakes and western interior operated and evolved independent of their relationships to the empires of the Atlantic world. It concludes that, from an alternative indigenous framework, European claims of discovery and possession in this region represented the rhetoric of empire rather than a genuine expansion of political sovereignty.

"Complete Liberty"? Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Social Change on the Lower Columbia River, 1805-1838

Whaley, G. — 2007-09-25

This article analyzes social change in the emerging colonial world of the lower Columbia River from 1805 to 1838, particularly regarding gender and sexuality. It teases out distinctions among formal marriages, informal "custom of the country" arrangements, the exercise of sexual "liberties" by young Chinookan women, and prostitution, revealing much of the complex sexual interactions between natives and newcomers. Such a focus illuminates critical, interpersonal aspects of fur trade society in this region as it developed into a complex colonial milieu, reflecting both indigenous and Western interests. Lower Chinookans adapted slavery and trade practices to accommodate the demands of their own social stratification and the challenges brought by newcomers. Colonial accommodations were first limited by Western racial and economic ideologies, and subsequently by the gross power inequity caused by the collapse of the native population in the early 1830s from malaria and other introduced diseases.

Cross-Cultural Crime and Osage Justice in the Western Mississippi Valley, 1700-1826

DuVal, K. — 2007-09-25

This article explores ideas of justice and punishment held by various Indians and Europeans, ending with the trial of several Osage men accused by the United States of the kind of killing that the Osage had done for a century in protection of their trade and land rights. It argues that Indian ways of cross-cultural interaction shaped interactions with Europeans and also changed in order to deal with the new hazards and opportunities that newcomers presented.

The Displacement of Violence: Ute Diplomacy and the Making of New Mexico's Eighteenth-Century Northern Borderlands

Blackhawk, N. — 2007-09-25

Examining shifting diplomatic and military initiatives undertaken by bands of Ute Indians in New Mexico, this article locates forms of colonial violence at the center of the early American West. Through their adaptations to the arrival of new colonial technologies, economies, and motivations, the Ute and other Indian peoples throughout northern New Mexico responded to the arrival of Spanish colonialism in creative and often violent ways. While forms of band consolidation, equestrian adoption, and increased warfare have characterized many studies of the indigenous West, less attention has been paid to the diplomatic strategies initiated by equestrian leaders in their new worlds. Increased diplomacy and alliance formation characterize the earliest recorded Comanche and Ute histories and offer windows into how Europeans influenced indigenous geographies as well as how various Shoshonean speakers responded to such transformations.

To Remain an Indian: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education; Learning to Write "Indian": The Boarding-School Experience and American Indian Literature; Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences

Kidwell, C. S. — 2007-09-25

Practicing Ethnohistory: Mining Archives, Hearing Testimony, Constructing Narrative

Carson, J. T. — 2007-09-25

Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country

Piker, J. — 2007-09-25

Memories of Lac du Flambeau Elders

Nesper, L. — 2007-09-25

The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade: The Three Thought Worlds of the Iroquois and the Huron, 1609-1650

Bilodeau, C. J. — 2007-09-25

Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880-1920

Cocks, C. — 2007-09-25

From Dominance to Disappearance: The Indians of Texas and the Near Southwest, 1786-1859

Scherer, M. R. — 2007-09-25

Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, revised and expanded edition

Sweet, J. A. — 2007-09-25

Terror and Violence: Imagination and the Unimaginable; Violence

Finnstrom, S. — 2007-09-25

Weaving the Past: A History of Latin America's Indigenous Women from the Prehispanic Period to the Present

Few, M. — 2007-09-25

Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico; Exploring New World Imagery

Wolfe, E. — 2007-09-25

Florida's Frontiers

Langer, E. D. — 2007-09-25

Tlacuilolli: Style and Contents of the Mexican Pictorial Manuscripts with a Catalog of the Borgia Group

Schwaller, J. F. — 2007-09-25

Kaqchikel Chronicles: The Definitive Edition

Restall, M. — 2007-09-25

Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1600

Lee, M. K. — 2007-09-25

The Myth of Moccasin Bluff: Rethinking the Potawatomi Pattern

O'Gorman, J. A. — 2007-07-02

In a 1969 Ethnohistory article James Fitting and Charles Cleland developed an ethnographic model derived from the Potawatomi Pattern of large, semipermanent villages with an emphasis on corn agriculture to interpret earlier cultural adaptations within the Carolinian biotic province. This and other works created and perpetuated the Myth of Moccasin Bluff, which identifies the Moccasin Bluff site in southwestern Michigan as an example of an agricultural village of the Potawatomi Pattern. In this essay the fit between the archaeological record and the Potawatomi Pattern analogue is reexamined, and the validity of transposing the historically observed focus on agriculture into more ancient history is critiqued. An alternative research framework for modeling ancient Potawatomi history is outlined.

On First Contact and Apotheosis: Manitou and Men in North America

Haefeli, E. — 2007-07-02

To understand the significance of stories of first contact in which native peoples around the world are said to have mistaken Europeans (or their goods) as gods or godlike, this article examines written and oral accounts of such encounters in the context within which they were transmitted. Noting that the source of many of these ideas is often native peoples, it suggests moving beyond the tendency to say they did or did not see Europeans as gods. Focusing in particular on a close reading of Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage up the river that now bears his name, it argues that the perceived disparity between native credulity and subsequent disenchantment is a function of misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the terminology employed. The native accounts never claimed the Europeans were gods in any Christian sense of the term. Instead, their words (in this case Manitou) reflected an understanding of the power and danger of the encounter that the actual experience confirmed. In this, it reminds us that there are several layers of interpretation—linguistic, religious, and ideological—that need to be taken into account when assessing these encounters. Also by incorporating what the native accounts have to say, a deeper understanding of its cultural significance in native terms can be created.

Whitemen, the Ipili, and the City of Gold: A History of the Politics of Race and Development in Highlands New Guinea

Jacka, J. K. — 2007-07-02

Ipili speakers in the highlands of Papua New Guinea creatively use the category "whiteman" both to structure their longing for socioeconomic progress and development and to critique the very institutions associated with development that they desire. This article explores the history of Ipili-white interactions from first contact in the 1930s, through the rise of indigenous mining, and up to the present to trace how "whiteness" as a category has transformed Ipili understandings of whites and the West. Today the Ipili, as landowners associated with the Porgera gold mine, are intimately entangled with development and its benefits and ills, which have prompted debate over how to build a "modern" town in the highlands.

Furthering Their Own Demise: How Kansa Indian Death Customs Accelerated Their Depopulation

Dixon, B. Y. — 2007-07-02

This essay examines the survival of the Kansa Indians prior to major contact with Euro-Americans, how Euro-American contact disrupted their survival, and how the Kansa responded to those disruptions. The research presented here focuses on the impact of wildlife depletion and Euro-American diseases leading up to the tribe's massive depopulation in the late nineteenth century. The most striking finding is that the cultural practices and religious customs with which the Kansa responded to these tremendous changes made matters worse for them. Their adherence to death customs, in particular, accelerated their depopulation when they endured back-to-back years of epidemics and starvation. This raises important questions about the specific influence of death customs and other practices used by Amerindian groups in response to depopulation following contact with Euro-Americans.

Good Words: Chief Joseph and the Production of Indian Speech(es), Texts, and Subjects

Guthrie, T. H. — 2007-07-02

Chief Joseph, who gained fame during the Nez Perce War of 1877, is one of the best-known Indian orators in American history. Yet the two principal texts attributed to him were produced under questionable circumstances, and it is unclear to what extent they represent anything he ever said. This essay examines the publication history of these texts and then addresses two questions about the treatment of Indian oratory in the nineteenth century. First, given their uncertain provenance, how and why did these texts become so popular and come to represent Indian eloquence and an authentic Native American voice? Second, what was the political significance of Indian speech and texts of Indian oratory in the confrontation between Euro-Americans and Indians over land? I argue that the production and interpretation of Indian speech facilitated political subjugation by figuring Indians as particular kinds of subjects and positioning them in a broader narrative about the West. The discursive and political dimensions of the encounter were inseparable, as Indian "eloquence" laid the way for Indian defeat. I conclude by advocating a disruptive reading of Indian oratory that rejects the belief that a real Indian subject lies behind these texts in any straightforward sense. To make this argument, I draw on linguistic anthropology and critical theory, analyzing firsthand accounts, newspaper reports, and descriptions of Indian speech and Nez Perce history.

Elusive Identities: Indigeneity and Nation-States in Central America

Carey, D. — 2007-07-02

New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations

Keenan, L. T. — 2007-07-02

Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands

Garrison, T. A. — 2007-07-02

Alliance and Conflict: The World System of the Inupiaq Eskimos

Peregrine, P. N. — 2007-07-02

Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England

Nicholas, M. A. — 2007-07-02

Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians

Frank, A. K. — 2007-07-02

The Deadly Politics of Giving: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke, and Jamestown

Harkin, M. — 2007-07-02

Demanding the Cherokee Nation: Indian Autonomy and American Culture, 1830-1900

Bowes, J. P. — 2007-07-02

Landscapes of Fraud: Mission Tumacacori, the Baca Float, and the Betrayal of the O'Odham

Sloan, S. — 2007-07-02

Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New

Schwaller, J. F. — 2007-07-02

Quintana Roo Archaeology

Clark, D. J. — 2007-07-02

Reshaping New Spain: Government and Private Interests in the Colonial Bureaucracy, 1531-1550

Schwaller, R. C. — 2007-07-02

Shipwrecked Identities: Navigating Race on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast

Dennis, P. A. — 2007-07-02

Estrategias identitarias: Educacion y la antropologia historica en Yucatan

Sullivan, P. — 2007-07-02

Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil

Wadsworth, J. E. — 2007-07-02

The Apotheosis of Ajacan's Jesuit Missionaries

Mallios, S. — 2007-04-26

Historical narratives describing the demise of a sixteenth-century Jesuit mission on the Chesapeake grew from direct accounts of indigenous murder to elaborate constructions of the missionaries' divine sacrifice. A seriation of details from the seven contemporary Jesuit sources demonstrates how and when Father Juan Baptista de Segura and his brethren came to be celebrated as martyrs. Once apotheosized, the Ajacan Jesuits' mythic stature grew despite historically established contradictions. Seemingly analogous martyrdoms, the anticipated self-sacrifice of Segura and his cadre, the individual and corporate benefits of divine forfeiture for clerics like the Jesuits, and parallels between biblical narratives and the sequence of events at the short-lived Chesapeake settlement led to an ecclesiastic apotheosis of the Ajacan missionaries.

Kandire in Real Time and Space: Sixteenth-Century Expeditions from the Pantanal to the Andes

Julien, C. — 2007-04-26

Anthropological understandings of past relations between peoples in the interior of South America have been constructed from limited readings of the historical sources. A case in point: the linkage of a hypothesis about the westward migration of Guaraní speakers in search of a "Land-without-Evil" to the Pantanal region on the upper Paraguay River was based on the reading of a single document from the period of exploration. This reading does not stand up when the larger corpus of written materials from this period is taken into account. Interview texts and narrative reports tell about travel from the Pantanal west to the Inca frontier to raid or trade for metals and to free captives taken on previous trips. Those who have suggested that the "Land-without-Evil" explains the dispersal of Guaraní speakers to the foothills and lowlands just east of the Andes adhere to the idea that linguistic relatedness is a conduit for the transmission of culture across all speakers and through time. What is problematic is that the classification of South American peoples on the basis of language was a product of European exploration. When the documents are read for what they tell us about what happened in real time and space, other ideas about social and political groupings and about the movement of peoples and languages begin to emerge.

Chocolate in the Underworld Space of Death: Cacao Seeds from an Early Classic Mortuary Cave

Prufer, K. M., Hurst, W. J. — 2007-04-26

Archaeological investigations at a mortuary cave in southern Belize recovered a bowl containing five cacao (chocolate) seeds dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The context of both the burial and the cacao informs our understanding of the role of chocolate as a ritual substance in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Most archaeologists think of cacao as having an economic function as a form of currency or as a prepared beverage whose use was restricted to elites. However, a review of documentary sources at the time of Spanish contact as well as of ethnographic accounts indicates that cacao is an integral component in many rites of passage, including those associated with birth, social personhood, initiation, marriage, and death, as well as the initiation of shamans. As such it becomes an intimate ritual product implicated in areas of social identity and reproduction that transcend economic and political status. Its presence in a burial likely indicates that it was either an important possession of the deceased or intended to provide ritual sustenance during the passage into the afterworld.

Ethnicity, Demography, and Estate Management in Sixteenth-Century Yucay

Covey, R. A., Elson, C. M. — 2007-04-26

Yucay was a royal estate in the Inca heartland built by provincial laborers for Huayna Capac, the penultimate ruler. Permanent retainers staffed the estate, maintaining a palace and leisure facilities for the emperor and providing material support for his family following his death. After the Spanish invasion, Yucay and other royal estates changed hands frequently, and Inca patterns of labor tribute gradually gave way to the Spanish colonial tribute system. The tributary redefinition of permanent retainers (yanakuna) in the Yucay Valley led to the 1571 resettlement of over twenty-three hundred individuals into four colonial towns, an undertaking that involved recording the names, ages, and ethnic identities of these individuals, household by household. This essay considers how the management of the Yucay estate evolved in the early colonial period, then presents an ethnic and demographic overview of the retainer population identified in the documents.

In the Path of Lewis and Clark

Collins, C. C. — 2007-04-26

Intersections: Economy, Political Culture, and Gendered Lives in the Andes

Cahill, D. — 2007-04-26

The Tlingit Indians in Russian America, 1741-1867

Luehrmann, S. — 2007-04-26

The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia

Znamenski, A. A. — 2007-04-26

Waccamaw Legacy: Contemporary Indians Fight for Survival

Lowery, M. M. — 2007-04-26

"Hang onto These Words": Johnny David's Delgamuukw Evidence

Roth, C. F. — 2007-04-26

Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History

Clark, M. L. — 2007-04-26

Spain in the Age of Exploration, 1492-1819

Schwaller, R. — 2007-04-26

Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, AD 600-800: A Poetics of Line

Webster, D. — 2007-04-26

An Encounter of Two Worlds: The Book of Chilam Balam of Kaua

Sullivan, P. — 2007-04-26

Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World

Garofalo, L. J. — 2007-04-26

Call for Papers

2007-04-26