Invisible Indians Native Americans In Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania is one of the few states that neither contains a reservation nor officially recognizes any Native American group. The stance of state government is that there are no Native Americans in the state. However, there is a large and growing community of Native Americans that is growing more active and more frustrated with the state's position. Invisible Indians is based on three years of research with Native Americans in Pennsylvania. The authors have crossed the state to attend powwows and tribal meetings, as well as interview individual Indians. Based on several, extensive ethnographic interviews, this book provide an extremely insightful account of Native Americans in Pennsylvania. The book also examines the history of Native American/government relationships within the state, as well as critical issues such as casino gambling and state recognition that are the crux of current negotiations. The book is also about the ways Pennsylvania's Native Americans are reinventing their history and their cultures to meet their own social and psychological (identity) needs. This book is a much-needed addition to the literature on Native American identity today--the critical issue in contemporary Native American politics. The book also debunks the official state stance that no Native Americans exist in Pennsylvania. Invisible Indians will be a valuable reference both to social scientists interested in personal identity issues as well as all interested in Pennsylvania cultures and issues.

This first volume in the new Stories of the Susquehanna Valley series describes the Native American presence in the Susquehanna River Valley, a key crossroads of the old Eastern Woodlands between the Great Lakes and the Chesapeake Bay in northern Appalachia. Combining archaeology, history, cultural anthropology, and the study of contemporary Native American issues, contributors describe what is known about the Native Americans from their earliest known presence in the valley to the contact era with Europeans. They also explore the subsequent consequences of that contact for Native peoples, including the removal, forced or voluntary, of many from the valley, in what became a chilling prototype for attempted genocide across the continent. Euro-American history asserted that there were no native people left in Pennsylvania (the center of the Susquehanna watershed) after the American Revolution. But with revived Native American cultural consciousness in the late twentieth century, Pennsylvanians of native ancestry began to take pride in and reclaim their heritage. This book also tells their stories, including efforts to revive Native cultures in the watershed, and Native perspectives on its ecological restoration. While focused on the Susquehanna River Valley, this collection also discusses topics of national significance for Native Americans and those interested in their cultures.

Due to a lack of proper documentation, low blood quantum, tribal politics or other reasons, hundreds of thousands of Americans of indigenous descent are unable to join a federally recognized tribe. Instead, they exist in a kind of legal and ethnic limbo, living as multiracial individuals and families in a country that does not fully acknowledge their multiracial heritage. Living outside of the system, they walk their own unique roads to preserve, reclaim and celebrate their heritage. Some lead extraordinary lives as traditional artisans, pow wow dancers, educators, activists or community elders. Others choose to honor their heritage privately, observing family traditions, reclaiming lost knowledge, or just remembering in solitude those who came before them. Invisible Indians explores the oral histories, personal experiences and opinions of this remarkable, yet largely misunderstood, segment of Native American society.

“One of the most beautifully written books I've ever read. Kelly McMasters is a literary giant.”—Zibby Owens, Good Morning America A memoir in intimate essays navigating marriage and motherhood, art and ambition, grief and nostalgia, and the elusive concept of home. Kelly McMasters found herself in her midthirties living her fantasy: she’d moved with her husband, a painter, from New York City to rural Pennsylvania, where their children roamed idyllic acres in rainboots and diapers. The pastoral landscape and the bookshop they opened were restorative at first, for her and her marriage. But soon, she was quietly plotting her escape. In The Leaving Season, McMasters chronicles the heady rush of falling in love and carving out a life in the city, the slow dissolution of her relationship in an isolated farmhouse, and the complexities of making a new home for herself and her children as a single parent. She delves into the tricky and often devastating balance between seeing and being seen; loss and longing; desire and doubt; and the paradox of leaving what you love in order to survive. Whether considering masculinity in the countryside through the life of a freemartin calf, the vulnerability of new motherhood in the wake of a car crash, or the power of community pulsing through an independent bookshop, The Leaving Season finds in every ending a new beginning.

The Carlisle Indian School (1879-1918) was an audacious educational experiment. Capt. Richard Henry Pratt, the school's founder and first superintendent, persuaded the federal government that training Native children to accept the white man's ways and values would be more efficient than fighting deadly battles. The result was that the last Indian war would be waged against Native children in the classroom. More than 10,500 children from virtually every Native nation in the United States were taken from their homes and transported to Pennsylvania. Carlisle provided a blueprint for the federal Indian school system that was established across the United States and served as a model for many residential schools in Canada. The Carlisle experiment initiated patterns of dislocation and rupture far deeper and more profound and enduring than its initiators ever grasped. Carlisle Indian Industrial School offers varied perspectives on the school by interweaving the voices of students' descendants, poets, and activists with cutting-edge research by Native and non-Native scholars. These contributions reveal the continuing impact and vitality of historical and collective memory, as well as the complex and enduring legacies of a school that still touches the lives of many Native Americans.

In Moravian Soundscapes, Sarah Eyerly contends that the study of sound is integral to understanding the interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in early Pennsylvania. In the mid-18th century, when the frontier between settler and Native communities was a shifting spatial and cultural borderland, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and the world around them. In Moravian communities, cultures of hearing and listening encompassed and also superseded musical traditions such as song and hymnody. Complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic environments—or soundscapes—characterized daily life in Moravian settlements such as Bethlehem, Nain, Gnadenhütten, and Friedenshütten. Through detailed analyses and historically informed recreations of Moravian communal, environmental, and religious soundscapes and their attendant hymn traditions, Moravian Soundscapes explores how sounds—musical and nonmusical, human and nonhuman—shaped the Moravians' religious culture. Combined with access to an interactive website that immerses the reader in mid-18th century Pennsylvania, and framed with an autobiographical narrative, Moravian Soundscapes recovers the roles of sound and music in Moravian communities and provides a road map for similar studies of other places and religious traditions in the future.