Women of the First Nations

Women of the First Nations
Author: Christine Miller
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 1996-08-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0887553966

"From diversity comes strength and wisdom": this was the guiding principle for selecting the articles in this collection. Because there is no single voice, identity, history, or cultural experience that represents the women of the First Nations, a realistic picture will have many facets. Accordingly, the authors in Women of the First Nations include Native and non-Native scholars, feminists, and activists from across Canada.Their work examines various aspects of Aboriginal women's lives from a variety of theoretical and personal perspectives. They discuss standard media representations, as well as historical and current realities. They bring new perspectives to discussions on Aboriginal art, literature, historical, and cultural contributions, and they offer diverse viewpoints on present economic, environmental, and political issues.This collection counters the marginalization and silencing of First Nations women's voices and reflects the power, strength, and wisdom inherent in their lives.

Great Women from Our First Nations

Great Women from Our First Nations
Author: Kelly Fournel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 84
Release: 2007
Genre: Indian women
ISBN: 9781897187258

Great Women from our First Nations profiles ten trailblazing women leaders who have raised the profile of indigenous culture in North America.

Life Stages and Native Women

Life Stages and Native Women
Author: Kim Anderson
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2012-08-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0887554164

A rare and inspiring guide to the health and well-being of Aboriginal women and their communities. The process of “digging up medicines” - of rediscovering the stories of the past - serves as a powerful healing force in the decolonization and recovery of Aboriginal communities. In Life Stages and Native Women, Kim Anderson shares the teachings of fourteen elders from the Canadian prairies and Ontario to illustrate how different life stages were experienced by Metis, Cree, and Anishinaabe girls and women during the mid-twentieth century. These elders relate stories about their own lives, the experiences of girls and women of their childhood communities, and customs related to pregnancy, birth, post-natal care, infant and child care, puberty rites, gender and age-specific work roles, the distinct roles of post-menopausal women, and women’s roles in managing death. Through these teachings, we learn how evolving responsibilities from infancy to adulthood shaped women’s identities and place within Indigenous society, and were integral to the health and well-being of their communities. By understanding how healthy communities were created in the past, Anderson explains how this traditional knowledge can be applied toward rebuilding healthy Indigenous communities today.

Restoring the Balance

Restoring the Balance
Author: Gail Guthrie Valaskakis
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2009
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0887553613

First Nations peoples believe the eagle flies with a female wing and a male wing, showing the importance of balance between the feminine and the masculine in all aspects of individual and community experiences. Centuries of colonization, however, have devalued the traditional roles of First Nations women, causing a great gender imbalance that limits the abilities of men, women, and their communities in achieving self-actualization.Restoring the Balance brings to light the work First Nations women have performed, and continue to perform, in cultural continuity and community development. It illustrates the challenges and successes they have had in the areas of law, politics, education, community healing, language, and art, while suggesting significant options for sustained improvement of individual, family, and community well-being. Written by fifteen Aboriginal scholars, activists, and community leaders, Restoring the Balance combines life histories and biographical accounts with historical and critical analyses grounded in traditional thought and approaches. It is a powerful and important book.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (10th Anniversary Edition)

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (10th Anniversary Edition)
Author: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2023-10-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807013145

New York Times Bestseller Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.” Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.

Indigenous Women, Work, and History

Indigenous Women, Work, and History
Author: Mary Jane Logan McCallum
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
Total Pages: 518
Release: 2014-05-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0887554326

When dealing with Indigenous women’s history we are conditioned to think about women as private-sphere figures, circumscribed by the home, the reserve, and the community. Moreover, in many ways Indigenous men and women have been cast in static, pre-modern, and one-dimensional identities, and their twentieth century experiences reduced to a singular story of decline and loss. In Indigenous Women, Work, and History, historian Mary Jane Logan McCallum rejects both of these long-standing conventions by presenting case studies of Indigenous domestic servants, hairdressers, community health representatives, and nurses working in “modern Native ways” between 1940 and 1980. Based on a range of sources, including the records of the Departments of Indian Affairs and National Health and Welfare, interviews, and print and audio-visual media, McCallum shows how state-run education and placement programs were part of Canada’s larger vision of assimilation and extinguishment of treaty obligations. Conversely, she also shows how Indigenous women link these same programs to their social and cultural responsibilities of community building and state resistance. By placing the history of these modern workers within a broader historical context of Aboriginal education and health, federal labour programs, post-war Aboriginal economic and political developments, and Aboriginal professional organizations, McCallum challenges us to think about Indigenous women’s history in entirely new ways.

Violence Against Indigenous Women

Violence Against Indigenous Women
Author: Allison Hargreaves
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2017-08-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1771122501

Violence against Indigenous women in Canada is an ongoing crisis, with roots deep in the nation’s colonial history. Despite numerous policies and programs developed to address the issue, Indigenous women continue to be targeted for violence at disproportionate rates. What insights can literature contribute where dominant anti-violence initiatives have failed? Centring the voices of contemporary Indigenous women writers, this book argues for the important role that literature and storytelling can play in response to gendered colonial violence. Indigenous communities have been organizing against violence since newcomers first arrived, but the cases of missing and murdered women have only recently garnered broad public attention. Violence Against Indigenous Women joins the conversation by analyzing the socially interventionist work of Indigenous women poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and fiction-writers. Organized as a series of case studies that pair literary interventions with recent sites of activism and policy-critique, the book puts literature in dialogue with anti-violence debate to illuminate new pathways toward action. With the advent of provincial and national inquiries into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, a larger public conversation is now underway. Indigenous women’s literature is a critical site of knowledge-making and critique. Violence Against Indigenous Women provides a foundation for reading this literature in the context of Indigenous feminist scholarship and activism and the ongoing intellectual history of Indigenous women’s resistance.

Living on the Land

Living on the Land
Author: Nathalie Kermoal
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2016-07-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1771990414

From a variety of methodological perspectives, contributors to Living on the Land explore the nature and scope of Indigenous women’s knowledge, its rootedness in relationships, both human and spiritual, and its inseparability from land and landscape. The authors discuss the integral role of women as stewards of the land and governors of the community and points to a distinctive set of challenges and possibilities for Indigenous women and their communities.

Indigenous Women's Writing and the Cultural Study of Law

Indigenous Women's Writing and the Cultural Study of Law
Author: Cheryl Suzack
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2017-01-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1442628588

Cover -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Indigenous Women's Writing, Storytelling, and Law -- Chapter One: Gendering the Politics of Tribal Sovereignty: Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (1978) and Ceremony (1977) -- Chapter Two: The Legal Silencing of Indigenous Women: Racine v. Woods (1983) and In Search of April Raintree (1983) -- Chapter Three: Colonial Governmentality and GenderViolence: State of Minnesota v. Zay Zah (1977) and The Antelope Wife (1998) -- Chapter Four: Land Claims, Identity Claims: Manypenny v. United States (1991) and Last Standing Woman (1997) -- Conclusion: For an Indigenous-Feminist Literary Criticism -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index

Native Women Changing Their Worlds

Native Women Changing Their Worlds
Author: Patricia J. Cutright
Publisher: 7th Generation
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2022-06-15
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1939053544

Native women have filled their communities with strength and leadership, both historically and as modern-day warriors. The twelve Indigenous women featured in this book overcame unimaginable hardships––racial and gender discrimination, abuse, and extreme poverty––only to rise to great heights in the fields of politics, science, education, and community activism. Such determination and courage reflect the essence of the traditional Cheyenne saying: “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.” The impressive accomplishments of these twelve dynamic women provide inspiration for all. B/W photos. Featured individuals: Ashley Callingbull Burnham (Enoch Cree Nation) Henrietta Mann, PhD (Southern Cheyenne) Ruth Anna Buffalo (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara Nation) Elouise Pepion Cobell (Blackfeet) Loriene Roy, PhD (Anishinabe, White Earth Reservation) Sharice Davids (Ho-Chunk Nation) Roberta Jamieson (Kanyenkehaka, Six Nations-Grand River Territory) Deb Haaland (Pueblo of Laguna) Elsie Marie Knott (Mississauga Ojibwe) Mary Golda Ross (Cherokee ) Heather Dawn Thompson (Lakota, Cheyenne River Sioux Emily Washines (Yakama Nation with Cree and Skokomish lineage).