Listening To Our Grandmothers Stories

A historical narrative of the Bloomfield Academy, its impact on educational development of the Native women who attended the school, and how it related to the education of the general Native population.

Bloomfield Academy was founded in 1852 by the Chickasaw Nation in conjunction with missionaries. It remained open for nearly a century, offering Chickasaw girls one of the finest educations in the West, far better than the schooling for most white children in Indian Territory. Founded long before Carlisle, the federally run off-reservation boarding school, Bloomfield (renamed Carter Seminary in 1932) represented one of the rare instances in the nineteenth century of a Native community seizing control of its children's formal education. After being forcibly relocated to Indian Territory, the Ch.

Stories of Our Living Ephemera recovers the history of the Cherokee National Seminaries from scattered archives and colonized research practices by critically weaving together pedagogy and archival artifacts with Cherokee traditional stories and Indigenous worldviews. This unique text adds these voices to writing studies history and presents these stories as models of active rhetorical practices of assimilation resistance in colonized spaces. Emily Legg turns to the Cherokee medicine wheel and cardinal directions as a Cherokee rhetorical discipline of knowledge making in the archives, an embodied and material practice that steers knowledge through the four cardinal directions around all relations. Going beyond historiography, Legg delineates educational practices that are intertwined with multiple strands of traditional Cherokee stories that privilege Indigenous and matriarchal theoretical lenses. Stories of Our Living Ephemera synthesizes the connections between contemporary and nineteenth-century academic experiences to articulate the ways that colonial institutions and research can be Indigenized by centering Native American sovereignty. By undoing the erasure of Cherokee literacy and educational practices, Stories of Our Living Ephemera celebrates the importance of storytelling, especially for those who are learning about Indigenous histories and rhetorics. This book is of cultural importance and value to academics interested in composition and pedagogy, the Cherokee Nation, and a general audience seeking to learn about Indigenous rhetorical devices and Cherokee history.

In The Native South, Tim Alan Garrison and Greg O’Brien assemble contributions from leading ethnohistorians of the American South in a state-of-the-field volume of Native American history from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Spanning such subjects as Seminole–African American kinship systems, Cherokee notions of guilt and innocence in evolving tribal jurisprudence, Indian captives and American empire, and second-wave feminist activism among Cherokee women in the 1970s, The Native South offers a dynamic examination of ethnohistorical methodology and evolving research subjects in southern Native American history. Theda Perdue and Michael Green, pioneers in the modern historiography of the Native South who developed it into a major field of scholarly inquiry today, speak in interviews with the editors about how that field evolved in the late twentieth century after the foundational work of James Mooney, John Swanton, Angie Debo, and Charles Hudson. For scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates in this field of American history, this collection offers original essays by Mikaëla Adams, James Taylor Carson, Tim Alan Garrison, Izumi Ishii, Malinda Maynor Lowery, Rowena McClinton, David A. Nichols, Greg O’Brien, Meg Devlin O’Sullivan, Julie L. Reed, Christina Snyder, and Rose Stremlau.

By the end of the Twentieth century, formal schooling - once the privilege of male elites - had become accessible to women, the working class and some ethnic minorities. The essays in this volume explore the historical origins of this transformation, analyzing struggles Australia, Canada, China, Columbia, India, the United States, and South Africa.

Once the most powerful indigenous nation in the southeastern United States, the Cherokees survive and thrive as a people nearly two centuries after the Trail of Tears and a hundred years after the allotment of Indian Territory. In Our Fire Survives the Storm, Daniel Heath Justice traces the expression of Cherokee identity in that nation’s literary tradition. Through cycles of war and peace, resistance and assimilation, trauma and regeneration, Cherokees have long debated what it means to be Cherokee through protest writings, memoirs, fiction, and retellings of traditional stories. Justice employs the Chickamauga consciousness of resistance and Beloved Path of engagement—theoretical approaches that have emerged out of Cherokee social history—to interpret diverse texts composed in English, a language embraced by many as a tool of both access and defiance. Justice’s analysis ultimately locates the Cherokees as a people of many perspectives, many bloods, mingled into a collective sense of nationhood. Just as the oral traditions of the Cherokee people reflect the living realities and concerns of those who share them, Justice concludes, so too is their literary tradition a textual testament to Cherokee endurance and vitality. Daniel Heath Justice is assistant professor of aboriginal literatures at the University of Toronto.

Originally published: Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1992, under the title: Stories from the motherline.

This collection of stories and vignettes-a multicultural anthology of women from diverse ethnic backgrounds—reveals how the mantle of culture and family is passed from woman to woman. As they vividly explode stereotypes, the pieces illustrate not only the courage of older women, but the received wisdom of younger women. Granddaughters remember their grandmothers as extraordinary women at once defiant and tradition bound, loving and stubbornly dogmatic. Some reinvent their grandmothers, others discover them for the first time. For example, Mary Helen Washington unmasks the word "freedpeople" in her grandmother's story to reveal the widespread aggression against supposedly freed slaves. Beryl Minkle's Bubba tells a tale of cultural and religious injustice that includes the oppression of women. Noted Native American writer Paula Gunn Allen reflects on her different cultural threads, as she searches for her Lebanese great-grandmother for whom she was named. Contributors include: Paula Gunn Allen, Marilou Awiakta, Robin Becker, Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Laurence B. Calver, Christina Chiu, Michelle Cloonan, Martha Collins, Jean Gould, Padma Hejmadi, Anna Kimmage, Florence Ladd, Monty S. Leitch, Aimee Liu, Beryl Minkle, Naomi Shihab Nye, Patricia Traxler, Ana Aloma Velilla, Annelise Wagner, Mary Helen Washington