Book Description
While Native American communities remain culturally innovative and continue to struggle for survival, researchers, teachers, and students lack texts that both represent the breadth of contemporary experiences and look toward the future. Editor Duane Champagne has assembled a volume of top scholarship reflecting the complexity and diversity of Native American cultural life. Section introductions provide background and analyses of the issues. Informative and critical studies offer experiences and perspectives from a variety of Native settings. This book and its companion volume, Contemporary Native American Political Issues, edited by Troy R. Johnson, are ideal teaching tools and resources for anyone working in or with Native communities. ... Read more

Book Description
Where do you stand on the issue of sports teams named after Native Americans? Are tribal claims on ancestral remains and sacred objects in museums valid? The contemporary issues that Native Americans struggle with are critical concerns for all Americans. This volume presents six major issues that have been divisive in and out of the Native American community. Readers will learn about the varied cultural, political, social, and economic dimensions of contemporary Native America and will be prompted to consider the complexity and complications of ethnic and cultural diversity in the United States. Readers will ponder the very foundations of the United States and the rights of its original inhabitants' descendants. The range of issues encompasses Native Americans throughout the country, from the Mashpee Wampanoags of Massachusetts to Pacific Northwest tribes. This book incorporates views from a wide variety of sources, including newspaper op-eds, Supreme Court rulings, and more. A resource guide complementing each chapter includes an extensive listing of suggested reading plus videos/film, Web sites, and organizations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Native American civil rights history
This was required reading for a graduate course in American history.

Paul C. Rosier examines the efforts of a number of Native American individuals and organizations to combat the efforts of the federal government to enforce a public policy of "termination," i.e., the dismantling of the reservation system and to relocate and compel Native Americans, through a variety of strategies into the mainstream of American society. For Rosier, the termination agenda was an example of the Cold War imperative to bring about ethnic integration. In the language of termination advocated, the goal of the Cold War was to "liberate" the enslaved peoples of the world. This included reservation Indians, who were who were thought as being confined in "concentration camps" and "socialist environments" which were considered confining, racialized, and emasculating spaces. Unfortunately, these descriptions misrepresented the increasingly hybrid nature of Native American institutions and identities In 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 stated Congress' intent to terminate Federal supervision and control of Indian affairs by making American Indians subject to the same laws, entitled to the same rights and privileges as other American citizens. Subsequently, Federal officials attempted to terminate treaty-based federal Indian policies through legislation
that unilaterally stripped individual tribes of their sovereignty, without tribal consent. That the termination policy slowed and eventually ended was due to the politicization of Native Americans who mobilized across tribal lines to protest termination legislation through the press and Congress. It is Rosier's contention that the termination effort in the context of the Cold War was responsible for fostering an international perspective among Native American activists who drew upon postwar decolonization movements and Cold War nation-building and connected them to domestic concerns over treaty rights, the definitions of democracy and freedom, the meaning of American citizenship and all that it entailed. By the end of the 1950s, a broad spectrum of Native American activists had embraced a Cold War conception of civil rights that was based on viewing treaties as instruments of tribal sovereignty and nationhood. By giving the fight against termination legislation an internationalist context, Native American leaders and organizations like the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) were able with some exceptions (e.g., the federal Voluntary Relocation Program) to eventually halt the wholesale legislative termination of reservation sovereignty. The June 1961 meeting of the American Indian Chicago Conference was a seminal event that put forth the idea of "place-based identities" for Native Americans, with the reservation at its heart. However, the 1960s also brought an ideological and generational split in the methods and mentality of Native American activists. A new generation would become radicalized when they perceived that Cold War-era nation building, the goal of an older generation, had bypassed the Indian nations; it would be replaced by a more tenuous proposition, the idea of a "greater Indian America."

Recommended reading for anyone interested in American history, civil rights history.
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Customer Reviews (1)

6 VOL.
Titles
Economic Issues and Development
0791079732
Education and Language Restoration
0791079708
Media Images and Representations
0791079686
Political Issues
0791079724
Sacred Sites and Repatriation
0791079694
Social Life and Issues
0791079716 ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR), published by The Register Guard on April 27, 2003. The length of the article is 720 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: New forum will focus on Native American issues.(Columns)(Column)
Publication: The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR) (Newspaper)
Date: April 27, 2003
Publisher: The Register Guard
Page: C1

Article Type: Column

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
How does one make a clear distinction between issues such as tribal sovereignty, indigenous rights, and law and justice? How do these topics differ, and can they be separated from, issues such as identity, health, and environment? The answer, of course, lies in the interconnectedness of all aspects of Native American life, culture, religion, and politics. This format encourages the consideration of Native politics both in terms of unifying themes and contexts and with regard to local situations, needs, and struggles. From the Introduction by Troy Johnson Troy Johnson and has assembled a volume of top scholarship from which emerges the complexity and diversity of Native American political life in the 1990's. Each topical section is introduced by the editor's own commentaries, which provide background and integrated analyses of the issues at hand. They are followed by informative, critical case studies and essays that offer experiences and perspectives from a variety of Native American and political settings. Students will gain grounded understandings of key issues as well as a variety of theoretical perspectives from which to understand contemporary American Indian political life. Topics include sovereignty, international indigenous rights, economic development, law, repatriation, and activism. ... Read more