Rainhouse Ocean

The Tohono O'odham of southern Arizona, formerly known as the Papago, have made a life in a place that many would consider uninhabitable. These desert people were converted to Catholicism by early Spanish missionaries, yet they retain much of their earlier lifeway as a means of continuing adaptation to their desert environment. Originally published in 1979, this book is a restudy of speeches and ritual information collected by anthropologist Underhill beginning in 1931 and published, in English only, in her book Papago Indian Religion (1946). It describes the Native - as opposed to the Christian - side of the yearly ritual cycle of the Tohono O'odham, showing how seven rites form a system of meanings that grew from the relation between these people and their desert homeland. The rites presented focus on the summer wine feast, salt pilgrimage, hunting, war, and flood.

A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today “A feat of both scholarship and storytelling.”—Claudio Saunt, author of Unworthy Republic Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed. A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread across North America. So, when Europeans showed up in the sixteenth century, they encountered societies they did not understand—those having developed differently from their own—and whose power they often underestimated. For centuries afterward, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests. In Native Nations, we see how Mohawks closely controlled trade with the Dutch—and influenced global markets—and how Quapaws manipulated French colonists. Power dynamics shifted after the American Revolution, but Indigenous people continued to command much of the continent’s land and resources. Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged new alliances and encouraged a controversial new definition of Native identity to attempt to wall off U.S. ambitions. The Cherokees created institutions to assert their sovereignty on the global stage, and the Kiowas used their power in the west to regulate the passage of white settlers across their territory. In this important addition to the growing tradition of North American history centered on Indigenous nations, Kathleen DuVal shows how the definitions of power and means of exerting it shifted over time, but the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant—and will continue far into the future.

Histories of Anthropology Annual presents diverse perspectives on the discipline's history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology. Volume 13, Disruptive Voices and the Singularity of Histories, explores the interplay of identities and scholarship through the history of anthropology, with a special section examining fieldwork predecessors and indigenous communities in Native North America. Individual contributions explore the complexity of women's history, indigenous history, national traditions, and oral histories to juxtapose what we understand of the past with its present continuities. These contributions include Sharon Lindenburger's examination of Franz Boas and his navigation with Jewish identity, Kathy M'Closkey's documentation of Navajo weavers and their struggles with cultural identities and economic resources and demands, and Mindy Morgan's use of the text of Ruth Underhill's O'odham study to capture the voices of three generations of women ethnographers. Because this work bridges anthropology and history, a richer and more varied view of the past emerges through the meticulous narratives of anthropologists and their unique fieldwork, ultimately providing competing points of access to social dynamics. This volume examines events at both macro and micro levels, documenting the impact large-scale historical events have had on particular individuals and challenging the uniqueness of a single interpretation of "the same facts."

During the nineteenth century, Americans looked to the eventual civilization and assimilation of Native Americans through a process of removal, reservation, and directed culture change. Underlying American Indian policy was a belief in a developmental stage theory of human societies in which agriculture marked the passage between barbarism and civilization. Solving the "Indian Problem" appeared as simple as teaching Indians to settle down and farm and then disappear into mainstream American society. Such policies for directed subsistence change and incorporation had far-reaching social and environmental consequences for native peoples and native lands. This study explores the experiences of three groups - Northern Utes, Hupas, and Tohono O'odhams - with settled reservation and allotted agriculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each group inhabited a different environment, and their cultural traditions reflected distinct subsistence adaptations to life in the western United States. Each experienced the full weight of federal agrarian policy yet responded differently, in culturally consistent ways, to subsistence change and the resulting social and environmental consequences. Attempts to establish successful agricultural economies ultimately failed as each group reproduced its own cultural values in a diminished and rapidly changing environment. In the end, such policies and agrarian experiences left Indian farmers economically dependent and on the periphery of American society.

A masterful reconstruction of one of the worst Indian massacres in American history In April 1871, a group of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono O?odham Indians surrounded an Apache village at dawn and murdered nearly 150 men, women, and children in their sleep. In the past century the attack, which came to be known as the Camp Grant Massacre, has largely faded from memory. Now, drawing on oral histories, contemporary newspaper reports, and the participants? own accounts, prize-winning author Karl Jacoby brings this perplexing incident and tumultuous era to life to paint a sweeping panorama of the American Southwest?a world far more complex, diverse, and morally ambiguous than the traditional portrayals of the Old West.

"There are other books dealing with life at the border, but none as intelligent, searching, objective or encompassing as Tyche Hendricks' vivid evocation of this region--its people, its landscape, its industry, its problems and its unique culture."_Peter Schrag, author of Not Fit for Society: Immigration and Nativism in America "This vivid, evocative book made me think of the Robert Frost line, 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall.' Tyche Hendricks' multilayered portrait of the human communities that transcend the U.S.-Mexico border should remind us all of what an artificial thing barriers, fences and checkpoints are. Maybe, just maybe, someday we, like so much of western Europe, can do without them."_Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains "This is an ambitious undertaking and Hendricks excels, finding stories along the way that illustrate the clash between, within and along that nearly 2,000-mile stretch of territory. Her reporting illustrates that for many U.S.-Mexico border residents, the international bridge is something you cross on your way to visit family, shop for groceries, get to a doctor or work."_Macarena Del Rocio Hernandez, University of Houston "Dear President Obama, next time you are at Camp David spend a couple of hours reading The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport. While the Health Care overhaul may well come to define your presidency, immigration will define the future of our country. In this marvelous book_rigorously grounded, smartly argued, beautifully crafted, Tyche Hendricks captures, in stories of biblical proportion, the contours of the magical line that at once unites us and divides us as Americans and as neighbors of our indispensable partner in the South. Ms. Hendricks's book, Mr. President, will remind you just what is at stake in getting immigration reform right. All Californians, Texans, and Arizonians, who think they know the border, should read this book. It is essential reading for our times."_Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Fisher Membership Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, and co-author of Latinos: Remaking America

The academic treatment of the environment and nature, since the 1980s, has been formalized in sub-disciplines like environmental history, environmental philosophy, ecocriticism, and eco-spirituality. Within these disciplines the concept of nature has been variously employed to reorient humanity to a holistic moral standard. In each case there is general consensus that inquiry ought to turn on moral considerations of the interaction of humans and the environment; with implied admonitions to live sustainably. Lending credence to the Earth as a superorganism in its own right, these modern ecological expressions can be traced to Rachel Carson’s revelations in Silent Spring. However, they have a long pre-history which appears in monistic philosophy, the spirit of Deism, in both Romanticism and the Enlightenment, and in political expressions of the idea of Nature’s God, designed to promote a secular vision of the state and to overturn predatory religious rivalries. With this literary momentum, Natural Communions, volume 40 of Religion and Public Life, gathers interdisciplinary essays which reconfigure humanity within an ecotheological anthropology and which treat the idea of the sacred from the perspective of an Earth-centered spirituality, thus redefining humanity’s response to ecological challenges and initiating a new status within a more expansive cosmology complete with a naturalized conception of Divine Reality.

"Ruth Underhill's intriguing memoir traces the story of her life, delving into the Depression, the famous anthropologists in her circle, and her fieldwork with a keen ethnographic eye. Underhill describes the Victorian society that first bound her and then ultimately enabled her success as a major figure in anthropology"--