Negotiating Native Friendship

Delgamuukw. Sixties Scoop. Bill C-31. Blood quantum. Appropriation. Two-Spirit. Tsilhqot’in. Status. TRC. RCAP. FNPOA. Pass and permit. Numbered Treaties. Terra nullius. The Great Peace… Are you familiar with the terms listed above? In Indigenous Writes, Chelsea Vowel, legal scholar, teacher, and intellectual, opens an important dialogue about these (and more) concepts and the wider social beliefs associated with the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canada. In 31 essays, Chelsea explores the Indigenous experience from the time of contact to the present, through five categories—Terminology of Relationships; Culture and Identity; Myth-Busting; State Violence; and Land, Learning, Law, and Treaties. She answers the questions that many people have on these topics to spark further conversations at home, in the classroom, and in the larger community. Indigenous Writes is one title in The Debwe Series.

After decades of federal dominance and dependence, Native governments now command attention as they exercise greater degrees of political, economic, and cultural power. Given the weight and importance of many issues confronting Native peoples today, these governments arguably matter even more to their peoples and to the broader society than ever before. Native governments have become critically important as the chief providers of basic services and the authors of solutions to collective problems in their societies. As major actors within the realm of democratic politics, they increasingly wield their powers to educate and advocate regarding Indigenous concerns. For many communities (including non-Native neighbors) they are the largest spenders and employers. They have also become adept at negotiating intergovernmental agreements that protect their peoples and resources while strengthening their unique political status. Native peoples and governments are also navigating the devastating and lingering health and economic impact of COVID-19; the profound environmental problems that have been exacerbated by climate change; and jurisdictional conflicts with local, state, and federal actors. Indigenous Governance is a comprehensive, critical examination of Native political systems: the senior political sovereigns on the North American continent in terms of their origin, development, structures, and operation. Author David E. Wilkins provides the recognition and respect due Indigenous governments, while offering a considered critique of their shortcomings as imperfect, sovereign institutions. This appraisal will highlight their history, evolution, internal and intergovernmental issues, and diverse structures.

Social network are nowadays inherent parts of our lives and highly developed communication technique helps us maintain our relationships. But how did it work in the early 19th century, in a time without cell phones and internet? A Chinese Hong Merchant in Canton Trade named Houqua (1769–1843), who lived in isolated Qing China, gives us an outstanding answer. Despite various barriers in cultures, languages, political situations and his identity as a Chinese merchant strictly under control of the Qing government, Houqua established a commercial network across three continents: Asia, North America and Europe. This book will not only uncover his secrets and actions in his Chinese social network especially patronage relationships in traditional Chinese society, but also reconstruct his intercultural network, including his unique and even "modern" friendship with some American traders which lasted almost half a century after Houqua ́s death.

Entangled Territorialities offers vivid ethnographic examples of how Indigenous lands in Australia and Canada are tangled with governments, industries, and mainstream society. Most of the entangled lands to which Indigenous peoples are connected have been physically transformed and their ecological balance destroyed. Each chapter in this volume refers to specific circumstances in which Indigenous peoples have become intertwined with non-Aboriginal institutions and projects including the construction of hydroelectric dams and open mining pits. Long after the agents of resource extraction have abandoned these lands to their fate, Indigenous peoples will continue to claim ancestral ties and responsibilities that cannot be understood by agents of capitalism. The editors and contributors to this volume develop an anthropology of entanglement to further examine the larger debates about the vexed relationships between settlers and indigenous peoples over the meaning, knowledge, and management of traditionally-owned lands.

In The Native Ground, Kathleen DuVal argues that it was Indians rather than European would-be colonizers who were more often able to determine the form and content of the relations between the two groups. Along the banks of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, far from Paris, Madrid, and London, European colonialism met neither accommodation nor resistance but incorporation. Rather than being colonized, Indians drew European empires into local patterns of land and resource allocation, sustenance, goods exchange, gender relations, diplomacy, and warfare. Placing Indians at the center of the story, DuVal shows both their diversity and our contemporary tendency to exaggerate the influence of Europeans in places far from their centers of power. Europeans were often more dependent on Indians than Indians were on them. Now the states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado, this native ground was originally populated by indigenous peoples, became part of the French and Spanish empires, and in 1803 was bought by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. Drawing on archaeology and oral history, as well as documents in English, French, and Spanish, DuVal chronicles the successive migrations of Indians and Europeans to the area from precolonial times through the 1820s. These myriad native groups—Mississippians, Quapaws, Osages, Chickasaws, Caddos, and Cherokees—and the waves of Europeans all competed with one another for control of the region. Only in the nineteenth century did outsiders initiate a future in which one people would claim exclusive ownership of the mid-continent. After the War of 1812, these settlers came in numbers large enough to overwhelm the region's inhabitants and reject the early patterns of cross-cultural interdependence. As citizens of the United States, they persuaded the federal government to muster its resources on behalf of their dreams of landholding and citizenship. With keen insight and broad vision, Kathleen DuVal retells the story of Indian and European contact in a more complex and, ultimately, more satisfactory way.

Why on earth would two history nerds use their own free time to write another US history textbook? Well, that, intelligent human, is the right question. This work breaks from the traditional memorization of who, what, when, where, and focuses on why and how. The former is popular in schools due to its efficiency in quantification for testing. You're either right or wrong about remembering facts. But it's so boring that most students turn off their brains once they set foot in the class, and that habit continues well into old age, if not recognized and corrected. Why and how are more subjective, therefore harder to grade. But with their asking, people become re-centered in our collective story, where they belong. Only then can proper context be understood, and criticism and perspective be applied. We believe this approach to be the missing link in our education and understanding of current issues, norms, and discussion points. Hopefully, after reading this work, each reader's critical thinking will activate around all history permanently. That will certainly aid humanity's evolution and communication. Wait, does that mean this book can be categorized as self-help? Argue away!