By William C. Meadows
Winner, a call remarkable educational Book
For many Plains Indians, being a warrior and veteran has lengthy been the conventional pathway to male honor and standing. males and boys shaped army societies to have fun victories in warfare, to accomplish neighborhood provider, and to arrange younger males for his or her position as warriors and hunters. through keeping cultural types contained in track, dance, ritual, language, kinship, economics, naming, and different semireligious ceremonies, those societies have performed an enormous position in retaining Plains Indian tradition from the pre-reservation period until eventually today.
In this ebook, Williams C. Meadows provides an in-depth ethnohistorical survey of Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche army societies, drawn from broad interviews with tribal elders and armed forces society individuals, unpublished archival assets, and linguistic information. He examines their constitution, capabilities, rituals, and martial symbols, displaying how they healthy inside of better tribal businesses. And he explores how army societies, like powwows, became a unique public layout for cultural and ethnic continuity.
Read Online or Download Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche Military Societies: Enduring Veterans, 1800 to the Present PDF
Best native american studies books
The Chumash World at European Contact: Power, Trade, and Feasting Among Complex Hunter-Gatherers
Whilst Spanish explorers and missionaries got here onto Southern California's shorelines in 1769, they encountered the big cities and villages of the Chumash, a those that at the moment have been one of the such a lot complicated hunter-gatherer societies on the earth. The Spanish have been entertained and fed at lavish feasts hosted by way of chiefs who governed over the settlements and who participated in broad social and financial networks.
In nineteen interrelated chapters, Weaver offers more than a few studies shared via local peoples within the Americas, from the far away earlier to the doubtful destiny. He examines Indian artistic output, from oral culture to the postmodern wordplay of Gerald Vizenor, and brings to mild formerly ignored texts.
Toward a Native American Critical Theory
Towards a local American severe conception articulates the rules and bounds of a particular local American serious conception during this postcolonial period. within the first book-length examine dedicated to this topic, Elvira Pulitano deals a survey of the theoretical underpinnings of works via famous local writers Paula Gunn Allen, Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, Greg Sarris, Louis Owens, and Gerald Vizenor.
In Plateau Indian methods with phrases, Barbara Monroe makes noticeable the humanities of persuasion of the Plateau Indians, whose ancestral grounds stretch from the Cascades to the Rockies, revealing a sequence of cultural identity that predates the colonial interval and maintains to today. Culling from hundreds and hundreds of pupil writings from grades 7-12 in reservation colleges, Monroe unearths that scholars hire a similar persuasive options as their forebears, as evidenced in dozens of post-conquest speech transcriptions and historic writings.
Extra info for Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche Military Societies: Enduring Veterans, 1800 to the Present
Example text
While sympathetic to the problems of native peoples, these works generally ignore native peoples’ ability to perceive, to interpret, to form strategies, and to set goals, portraying them merely as passive recipients of new sociocultural forms dictated by a dominant society. Many current ethnohistorians emphasize Indian-Indian relations in what is known as ‘‘New Indian History’’ (Fowler 1982, 1987; Moore 1987; Kehoe 1989; Foster 1991; White 1991; Dowd 1992). Using a multifield approach, these works place native peoples at the center and seek to understand the reasons for their actions.
This study combines extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and analysis of symbols to (1) reconstruct the history of KCA military sodalities and demonstrate how they reflect past and present tribal values, particularly through military society rituals; (2) determine the significance of these societies for their respective tribal forms of social organization; (3) show how these groups serve as enculturative and adaptive forms of social organization for the maintenance of a distinct tribal ethos and ethnicity and, later, for identity in a larger, encapsulating society; and (4) delineate ethnohistorically and diachronically the military society symbols embraced by the KCA and how these functioned in social integration and enculturation through time.
Plains men’s military societies visibly promote the common central theme of a warrior tradition—a warrior ideology, which at specific times can be argued to be an ethos. Much of the work of Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Ruth Benedict (Harris 1968 : 393– 448) involved at- Sodalities and Plains Indian Military Societies 9 tempts to define ethos and national character in studies of culture and personality. ’’ Charles Winick (1968 : 193) defines it as ‘‘the totality of the distinctive ways of living that separate one group from another, especially its values.