Download or read book Muscogee Daughter written by Susan Supernaw and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How American is Miss America? For Susan Supernaw, a Muscogee (Creek) and Munsee Native American, the question wasn't just academic. Throughout a childhood clouded by poverty, alcoholism, abuse, and a physical disability, Supernaw sought escape in school and dance and the Native American Church. She became a presidential scholar, won a scholarship to college, and was crowned Miss Oklahoma in 1971. Supernaw might not have won the Miss America pageant that year, but she did call attention to the Native peoples living largely invisible lives throughout their own American land. And she did at long last earn her Native American name. Chronicling a quest to escape poverty and find meaning, Supernaw's story is revealing, humorous, and deeply moving. Muscogee Daughter is the story of finding a Native American identity among the distractions and difficulties of American life and of discerning an identity among competing notions of what it is to be a woman, a Native American, and a citizen of the world.
Download or read book Jingle Dancer written by Cynthia Leitich Smith and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2000-04-05 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jenna, a contemporary Muscogee (Creek) girl in Oklahoma, wants to honor a family tradition by jingle dancing at the next powwow. But where will she find enough jingles for her dress? An unusual, warm family story, beautifully evoked in Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu's watercolor art. Notable Children's Trade Books in the Field of Social Studies 2001, National Council for SS & Child. Book Council
Download or read book Beginning Creek written by Pamela Joan Innes and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning Creek provides a basic introduction to the language and culture of the Mvskoke-speaking peoples, Muskogee (Creek) and Seminole Indians. Written by linguistic anthropologist Pamela Innes and native speakers Linda Alexander and Bertha Tilkens, the text is accessible to general readers and students and is accompanied by two compact discs. The volume begins with an introduction to Creek history and language, and then each chapter introduces readers to a new grammatical feature, vocabulary set, and series of conversational sentences. Translation exercises from English to Mvskoke and Mvskoke to English reinforce new words and concepts. The chapters conclude with brief essays by Linda Alexander and Bertha Tilkens on Creek culture and history and suggestions for further reading. The two audio CDs present examples of ceremonial speech, songs, and storytelling and include pronunciations of Mvskoke language keyed to exercises and vocabulary lists in the book. The combination of recorded and written material gives students a chance to learn and practice Mvskoke as an oral and written language. Although Mvskoke speakers include the Muskogee (Creek) and Seminole Nations of Oklahoma, the Poarche Band of Creek Indians in Alabama, and some Florida Seminoles, the number of native speakers of Mvskoke has declined. Because the authors believe that language and culture are inextricably linked, they have combined their years of experience speaking and teaching Mvskoke to design an introductory textbook to help Creek speakers preserve their traditional language and way of life.
Download or read book Looking for Miss America written by Margot Mifflin and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Popular Culture Association’s Emily Toth Best Book in Women’s Studies Award From an author praised for writing “delicious social history” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) comes a lively account of memorable Miss America contestants, protests, and scandals—and how the pageant, now in its one hundredth year, serves as an unintended indicator of feminist progress Looking for Miss America is a fast–paced narrative history of a curious and contradictory institution. From its start in 1921 as an Atlantic City tourist draw to its current incarnation as a scholarship competition, the pageant has indexed women’s status during periods of social change—the post–suffrage 1920s, the Eisenhower 1950s, the #MeToo era. This ever–changing institution has been shaped by war, evangelism, the rise of television and reality TV, and, significantly, by contestants who confounded expectations. Spotlighting individuals, from Yolande Betbeze, whose refusal to pose in swimsuits led an angry sponsor to launch the rival Miss USA contest, to the first black winner, Vanessa Williams, who received death threats and was protected by sharpshooters in her hometown parade, Margot Mifflin shows how women made hard bargains even as they used the pageant for economic advancement. The pageant’s history includes, crucially, those it excluded; the notorious Rule Seven, which required contestants to be “of the white race,” was retired in the 1950s, but no women of color were crowned until the 1980s. In rigorously researched, vibrant chapters that unpack each decade of the pageant, Looking for Miss America examines the heady blend of capitalism, patriotism, class anxiety, and cultural mythology that has fueled this American ritual.
Download or read book Transcending the New Woman written by Charlotte J. Rich and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dawn of the twentieth century saw the birth of the New Woman, a cultural and literary ideal that replaced Victorian expectations of domesticity with visions of social, political, and economic autonomy. Although such writers as Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin treated these ideals in well-known literature of that era, marginalized women also explored changing gender roles in works that deserve more attention today. This book is the first study to focus solely on multiethnic women writers' responses to the ideal of the New Woman in America, opening up a world of literary texts that provide new insight into the phenomenon. Charlotte Rich reveals how these authors uniquely articulated the contradictions of the American New Woman, and how social class, race, or ethnicity impacted women's experiences of both public and private life in the Progressive era. Rich focuses on the work of writers representing five distinct ethnicities: Native Americans S. Alice Callahan and Mourning Dove, African American Pauline Hopkins, Chinese American Sui Sin Far, Mexican American María Cristina Mena, and Jewish American Anzia Yezierska. She shows that some oftheir works contain both affirmative and critical portraits of white New Women; in other cases, while these authorsalign their multiethnic heroines with the new ideals, those ideals are sometimes subordinated to more urgent dialogues about inequality and racial violence. Here are views of women not usually encountered in fiction of this era. Callahan's and Mourning Dove's novels allude to women's rights but ultimately privilege critiques of violence against Native Americans. Hopkins's novels trace an increasingly pessimistic trajectory, drawing cynical conclusions about black women's ability to thrive in a prejudiced society. Mena's magazine portraits of Mexican life present complex critiques of this independent ideal of womanhood. Yezierska's stories question the philanthropy of socially privileged Progressive female reformers with whom immigrant women interact. These writers' works sometimes affirm emerging ideals but in other cases illuminate the iconic New Woman's blindness to her own racial and economic privilege. Through her insightful analysis, Rich presents alternative versions of female autonomy, with characters living outside the mainstream or moving between cultures. Transcending the New Woman offers multiple ways of transcending an ideal that was problematic in its exclusivity, as well as an entrée to forgotten works. It shows how the concept of the New Woman can be seen in newly complex ways when viewed through the writings of authors whose lives often embody the New Woman's emancipatory goals-and whose fictions both affirm and complicateher aspirations.
Download or read book Here She Is written by Hilary Levey Friedman and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh exploration of American feminist history told through the lens of the beauty pageant world. Many predicted that pageants would disappear by the 21st century. Yet they are thriving. America’s most enduring contest, Miss America, celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2020. Why do they persist? In Here She Is, Hilary Levey Friedman reveals the surprising ways pageants have been an empowering feminist tradition. She traces the role of pageants in many of the feminist movement’s signature achievements, including bringing women into the public sphere, helping them become leaders in business and politics, providing increased educational opportunities, and giving them a voice in the age of #MeToo. Using her unique perspective as a NOW state president, daughter to Miss America 1970, sometimes pageant judge, and scholar, Friedman explores how pageants became so deeply embedded in American life from their origins as a P.T. Barnum spectacle at the birth of the suffrage movement, through Miss Universe’s bathing beauties to the talent- and achievement-based competitions of today. She looks at how pageantry has morphed into culture everywhere from The Bachelor and RuPaul’s Drag Race to cheer and specialized contests like those for children, Indigenous women, and contestants with disabilities. Friedman also acknowledges the damaging and unrealistic expectations pageants place on women in society and discusses the controversies, including Miss America’s ableist and racist history, Trump’s ownership of the Miss Universe Organization, and the death of child pageant-winner JonBenét Ramsey. Presenting a more complex narrative than what’s been previously portrayed, Here She Is shows that as American women continue to evolve, so too will beauty pageants.
Download or read book Wynema written by Sophia Alice Callahan and published by Graphic Arts Books. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891) is a novel by Muscogee American writer Sophia Alice Callahan. Published when the author was only 23 years old, Wynema: A Child of the Forest is the first novel written by an American Indian woman. Although it gained little, if any, attention upon publication, the novel was rediscovered and reprinted in 1997. Wynema: A Child of the Forest is an essential record of the Massacre at Wounded Knee and the subsequent Lakota Ghost Dance movement, a work of fiction which looks at the suffering of American Indians through the eyes of an assimilated Muscogee woman, a character not unlike Callahan herself. Wynema is a young Muscogee girl. Raised in Indian Territory, she is educated in English and becomes a teacher at a local mission school. There, she befriends a white coworker, whose brother she eventually marries. In time, the couple gives birth to a child and begins to raise their family. However, following the Massacre at Wounded Knee, and horrified by stories of orphaned Lakota children left to fend for themselves, Wynema and her husband decide to expand their family by adopting a young Lakota girl. Through this family narrative, Callahan examines the assimilation of American Indians into Western culture while providing a critical comparison of Christianity and the Ghost Dance religion. In its description of the events at Wounded Knee, the novel portrays heroic Lakota women risking their lives to save children from the onslaught of American soldiers, a circumstance unreported in the press’s presentation of the Massacre. Wynema: A Child of the Forest is an important and vastly unknown novel from the first woman novelist of American Indian heritage. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sophia Alice Callahan’s Wynema: A Child of the Forest is a classic of American Indian literature reimagined for modern readers.
Download or read book In Defense of Loose Translations written by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Defense of Loose Translations is a memoir that bridges the personal and professional experiences of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. Having spent much of her life illuminating the tragic irony of being an Indian in America, this provocative and often controversial writer narrates the story of her intellectual life in the field of Indian studies. Drawing on her experience as a twentieth-century child raised in a Sisseton Santee Dakota family and under the jurisdictional policies that have created significant social isolation in American Indian reservation life, Cook-Lynn tells the story of her unexpectedly privileged and almost comedic “affirmative action” rise to a professorship in a regional western university. Cook-Lynn explores how different opportunities and setbacks helped her become a leading voice in the emergence of Indian studies as an academic discipline. She discusses lecturing to professional audiences, activism addressing nonacademic audiences, writing and publishing, tribal-life activities, and teaching in an often hostile and, at times, corrupt milieu. Cook-Lynn frames her life’s work as the inevitable struggle between the indigene and the colonist in a global history. She has been a consistent critic of the colonization of American Indians following the treaty-signing and reservation periods of development. This memoir tells the story of how a thoughtful critic has tried to contribute to the debate about indigenousness in academia.
Download or read book Bitterroot written by Susan Devan Harness and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2019 High Plains Book Award Winner for the Creative Nonfiction and Indigenous Writer categories In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her “real” parents. He replied that they had died in a car accident not long after she was born—except they hadn’t, as Harness would learn in a conversation with a social worker a few years later. Harness’s search for answers revolved around her need to ascertain why she was the target of racist remarks and why she seemed always to be on the outside looking in. New questions followed her through college and into her twenties when she started her own family. Meeting her biological family in her early thirties generated even more questions. In her forties Harness decided to get serious about finding answers when, conducting oral histories, she talked with other transracial adoptees. In her fifties she realized that the concept of “home” she had attributed to the reservation existed only in her imagination. Making sense of her family, the American Indian history of assimilation, and the very real—but culturally constructed—concept of race helped Harness answer the often puzzling questions of stereotypes, a sense of nonbelonging, the meaning of family, and the importance of forgiveness and self-acceptance. In the process Bitterroot also provides a deep and rich context in which to experience life.
Download or read book Too Strong to Be Broken written by Edward J. Driving Hawk and published by Bison Books. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Too Strong to Be Broken explores the dynamic life of Edward J. Driving Hawk, a Vietnam and Korean War veteran, chairman of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, former president of the National Congress of American Indians, husband, father, recovered alcoholic, and convicted felon. Driving Hawk’s story begins with his childhood on the rural plains of South Dakota, then follows him as he travels back and forth to Asia for two wars and journeys across the Midwest and Southwest. In his positions of leadership back in the United States, Driving Hawk acted in the best interest of his community, even when sparring with South Dakota governor Bill Janklow and the FBI. After retiring from public service, he started a construction business and helped create the United States Reservation Bank and Trust. Unfortunately, a key participant in the bank embezzled millions and fled, leaving Driving Hawk to take the blame. Rather than plead guilty to a crime he did not commit, the seventy-four-year-old grandfather went to prison for a year and a day, even as he suffered the debilitating effects of Agent Orange. Driving Hawk fully believes that the spirits of his departed ancestors watched out for him during his twenty-year career in the U.S. Air Force, including his exposure to Agent Orange, and throughout his life as he survived surgeries, strokes, a tornado, a plane crash, and alcoholism. With the help of his sister, Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, Driving Hawk recounts his life’s story alongside his wife, Carmen, and their five children.
Download or read book Tales of the Old Indian Territory and Essays on the Indian Condition written by John Milton Oskison and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 677 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of the twentieth century, Indian Territory, which would eventually become the state of Oklahoma, was a multicultural space in which various Native tribes, European Americans, and African Americans were equally engaged in struggles to carve out meaningful lives in a harsh landscape. John Milton Oskison, born in the territory to a Cherokee mother and an immigrant English father, was brought up engaging in his Cherokee heritage, including its oral traditions, and appreciating the utilitarian value of an American education. Oskison left Indian Territory to attend college and went on to have a long career in New York City journalism, working for the New York Evening Post and Collier?s Magazine. He also wrote short stories and essays for newspapers and magazines, most of which were about contemporary life in Indian Territory and depicted a complex multicultural landscape of cowboys, farmers, outlaws, and families dealing with the consequences of multiple interacting cultures. Though Oskison was a well-known and prolific Cherokee writer, journalist, and activist, few of his works are known today. This first comprehensive collection of Oskison?s unpublished autobiography, short stories, autobiographical essays, and essays about life in Indian Territory at the turn of the twentieth century fills a significant void in the literature and thought of a critical time and place in the history of the United States.
Download or read book Spiral to the Stars written by Laura Harjo and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All communities are teeming with energy, spirit, and knowledge, and Spiral to the Stars taps into and activates this dynamism to discuss Indigenous community planning from a Mvskoke perspective. This book poses questions about what community is, how to reclaim community, and how to embark on the process of envisioning what and where the community can be. Geographer Laura Harjo demonstrates that Mvskoke communities have what they need to dream, imagine, speculate, and activate the wishes of ancestors, contemporary kin, and future relatives—all in a present temporality—which is Indigenous futurity. Organized around four methodologies—radical sovereignty, community knowledge, collective power, and emergence geographies—Spiral to the Stars provides a path that departs from traditional community-making strategies, which are often extensions of the settler state. Readers are provided a set of methodologies to build genuine community relationships, knowledge, power, and spaces for themselves. Communities don’t have to wait on experts because this book helps them activate their own possibilities and expertise. A detailed final chapter provides participatory tools that can be used in workshop settings or one on one. This book offers a critical and concrete map for community making that leverages Indigenous way-finding tools. Mvskoke narratives thread throughout the text, vividly demonstrating that theories come from lived and felt experiences. This is a must-have book for community organizers, radical pedagogists, and anyone wishing to empower and advocate for their community.
Download or read book My Grandfather s Altar written by Richard Moves Camp and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2024-03 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Moves Camp’s My Grandfather’s Altar is an oral-literary narrative account of five generations of Lakota religious tradition. Moves Camp is the great-great-grandson of Wóptuȟ’a (“Chips”), the holy man remembered for providing Crazy Horse with war medicines of power and protection. The Lakota remember the descendants of Wóptuȟ’a for their roles in preserving Lakota ceremonial traditions during the official prohibition period (1883–1934), when the U.S. Indian Religious Crimes Code outlawed Indian religious ceremonies with the threat of imprisonment. Wóptuȟ’a, his two sons, James Moves Camp and Charles Horn Chips, his grandson Sam Moves Camp, and his great-great-grandson Richard Moves Camp all became well-respected Lakota spiritual leaders. My Grandfather’s Altar offers the rare opportunity to learn firsthand how one family’s descendants played a pivotal role in revitalizing Lakota religion in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Stories from Saddle Mountain written by Henrietta Tongkeamha and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-11 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories from Saddle Mountain recounts family stories that connected the Tongkeamhas, a Kiowa family, to the Saddle Mountain community for more than a century. Henrietta Apayyat (1912–93) grew up and married near Saddle Mountain, where she and her husband raised five sons and five daughters. She began penning her memoirs in 1968, including accounts about a Peyote meeting, revivals and Christmas encampments at Saddle Mountain Church, subsistence activities, and attending boarding schools and public schools. When not in school, Henrietta spent much of her childhood and adolescence close to home, working and occasionally traveling to neighboring towns with her grandparents, whereas her son Raymond Tongkeamha left frequently and wandered farther. Both experienced the transformation from having no indoor plumbing or electricity to having radios, televisions, and JCPenney. Together, their autobiographies illuminate dynamic changes and steadfast traditions in twentieth-century Kiowa life in the Saddle Mountain countryside.
Download or read book The Extraordinary Book of Native American Lists written by Arlene B. Hirschfelder and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communicates information about the histories, contemporary presence, and various other facts of the Native peoples of the United States. From publisher description.
Download or read book Out of the Crazywoods written by Cheryl Savageau and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-05 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of the Crazywoods is the riveting and insightful story of Abenaki poet Cheryl Savageau's late-life diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Without sensationalizing, she takes the reader inside the experience of a rapid-cycling variant of the disorder, providing a lens through which to understand it and a road map for navigating the illness. The structure of her story--impressionistic, fragmented--is an embodiment of the bipolar experience and a way of perceiving the world. Out of the Crazywoods takes the reader into the euphoria of mania as well as its ugly, agitated rage and into "the lying down of desire" that is depression. Savageau articulates the joy of being consort to a god and the terror of being chased by witchcraft, the sound of voices that are always chattering in your head, the smell of wet ashes that invades your home, the perception that people are moving in slow motion and death lurks at every turnpike, and the feeling of being loved by the universe and despised by everyone you've ever known. Central to the journey in Out of the Crazywoods is the sensitive child who becomes a poet and writer who finds clarity in her art and a reason to heal in her grandchildren. Her journey reveals the stigma and the social, personal, and economic consequences of the illness but reminds us that the disease is not the person. Grounded in Abenaki culture, Savageau questions cultural definitions of madness and charts a path to recovery through a combination of medications, psychotherapy, and ceremony.
Download or read book My Side of the River written by Elias Kelly and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2023-07 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1971 the U.S. government created the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and extinguished Alaska Native aboriginal rights to hunting and fishing--forever changing the way Alaska Natives could be responsible for their way of life. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service claimed all wildlife management responsibility and have since told Natives when, where, and how to fish, hunt, and harvest according to colonial management doctrines. We need only look at our current Alaska salmon conditions to see how these management efforts have worked. In My Side of the River, agricultural specialist Elias Kelly (Yup'ik) relates how traditional Native subsistence hunting is often unrecognized by government regulations, effectively criminalizing those who practice it. Kelly alternates between personal stories of friends, family, and community and legal attempts to assimilate Native Alaskans into white U.S. fishing and hunting culture. He also covers landownership, incorporation of Alaska residents, legal erasure of Native identity, and poverty rates among Native Alaskans. In this memoir of personal and public history, Kelly illuminates the impact of government regulations on traditional life and resource conservation.
