Download or read book Viola Martinez California Paiute written by Diana Meyers Bahr and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-10-09 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life story of Viola Martinez, an Owens Valley Paiute Indian of eastern California, extends over nine decades of the twentieth century. Viola experienced forced assimilation in an Indian boarding school, overcame racial stereotypes to pursue a college degree, and spent several years working at a Japanese American internment camp during World War II. Finding herself poised uncertainly between Indian and white worlds, Viola was determined to turn her marginalized existence into an opportunity for personal empowerment. In Viola Martinez, California Paiute, Diana Meyers Bahr recounts Viola’s extraordinary life story and examines her strategies for dealing with acculturation. Bahr allows Viola to tell her story in her own words, beginning with her early years in Owens Valley, where she learned traditional lifeways, such as gathering piñons, from her aunt. In the summers, she traveled by horse and buggy into the High Sierras where her aunt traded with Basque sheepherders. Viola was sent to the Sherman Institute, a federal boarding school with a mandate to assimilate American Indians into U.S. mainstream culture. Punished for speaking Paiute at the boarding school, Viola and her cousin climbed fifty-foot palm trees to speak their native language secretly. Realizing that, despite her efforts, she was losing her language, Viola resolved not just to learn English but to master it. She earned a degree from Santa Barbara State College and pursued a career as social worker. During World War II, Viola worked as an employment counselor for Japanese American internees at the Manzanar War Relocation Authority camp. Later in life, she became a teacher and worked tirelessly as a founding member of the Los Angeles American Indian Education Commission.

Download or read book Changed Forever Volume II written by Arnold Krupat and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After a theoretical and historical introduction to American Indian boarding-school literature, Changed Forever, Volume II examines the autobiographical writings of a number of Native Americans who attended the federal Indian boarding schools. Considering a wide range of tribal writers, some of them well known—like Charles Eastman, Luther Standing Bear, and Zitkala-Sa—but most of them little known—like Walter Littlemoon, Adam Fortunate Eagle, Reuben Snake, and Edna Manitowabi, among others—the book offers the first wide-ranging assessment of their texts and their thoughts about their experiences at the schools.

Download or read book The Lives of Otto Chenoweth written by Lawrence Woods and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2016-01-23 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is around 1885 when Otto Chenoweth, a teenager from a good family with a talent for making friends and creating art, moves from refined Massachusetts to untamed Wyoming in search of beautiful scenery to paint. After Otto secures work on a cattle ranch, he meets two workers with experience on the wrong side of the law. After they convince Otto to move with them to the Sundance country, Ottos life takes a new direction as he gambles, homesteads, rustles, and occasionally gets in trouble with the law. Twenty years later, a Wyoming sheriff captures an unruly prisoner. Otto, who has just stolen a herd of over one hundred branded horses, is now known as the Gentleman Horse Thief. As the law threatens drastic control over his behavior, Otto is declared insane. After the sheriff returns him to the east in an effort to shield him from those who still want to jail him, Otto undergoes a remarkable transformation that leads him back to the west where he channels his risk-taking impulses into minerals prospecting and, in an ironic closure to his experiences with law enforcement, is elected as justice of the peace. The Lives of Otto Chenoweth shares the fascinating biography of a Wyoming horse thief who surprisingly turned over a new leaf in mid-life and dispensed justice on the good side of the law.

Download or read book California through Native Eyes written by William J. Bauer, Jr., Jr. and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bauer tells California history strictly through Native perspectives. Most California histories begin with the arrival of the Spanish missionaries in the late eighteenth century and conveniently skip to the Gold Rush of 1849. Noticeably absent from these stories are the perspectives and experiences of the people who lived on the land long before European settlers arrived. Historian William Bauer seeks to correct that oversight through an innovative approach that tells California history strictly through Native perspectives. Using oral histories of Concow, Pomo, and Paiute workers, taken as part of a New Deal federal works project, Bauer reveals how Native peoples have experienced and interpreted the history of the land we now call California. Combining these oral histories with creation myths and other oral traditions, he demonstrates the importance of sacred landscapes and animals and other nonhuman actors to the formation of place and identity. He also examines tribal stories of ancestors who prophesied the coming of white settlers and uses their recollections of the California Indian Wars to push back against popular narratives that seek to downplay Native resistance. The result both challenges the “California story” and enriches it with new voices and important points of view, serving as a model for understanding Native historical perspectives in other regions.

Download or read book Boarding School Blues written by Clifford E. Trafzer and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in depth look at boarding schools and their effect on the Native students.

Download or read book The Mono of California written by and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2003-12-15 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the origins, history, and culture of the Mono people from what is now California, from prehistory to the present.

Download or read book The Students of Sherman Indian School written by Diana Meyers Bahr and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sherman Indian High School, as it is known today, began in 1892 as Perris Indian School on eighty acres south of Riverside, California, with nine students. Its mission, like that of other off-reservation Indian boarding schools, was to "civilize" Indian children, which meant stripping them of their Native culture and giving them vocational training. Today, the school on Magnolia Avenue in Riverside serves 350 students from 68 tribes, and its curricula are designed to both preserve Native languages and traditions and prepare students for life and work in mainstream American society. This book offers the first full history of Sherman Indian School’s 100-plus years, a history that reflects federal Indian education policy since the late nineteenth century. Sherman Institute's historical trajectory features the abuse and exploitation familiar from other accounts of life at Indian boarding schools—children punished and humiliated for maintaining Native ways and put to work as manual laborers. But this book also brings to light the ways Native children managed to maintain their dignity, benefited from interacting with students from other tribes, and often even expressed appreciation for the experiences at Sherman. Alternating periods of assimilation and self-determination form a critical part of the story Diana Meyers Bahr tells, but her interpretation of the students’ complex experiences is more subtle than that. From the accounts of students, educators, and administrators over the years, Bahr draws a picture of Sherman students successfully navigating a complicated middle course between total assimilation and total rejection of white education. The ambivalence of such a middle way has meant confronting painful moral choices—and ultimately it has deepened students’ appreciation for the diverse cultures of Indian America and heightened their awareness of their own tribal identity. The ramifications can be seen in today's Sherman Indian High School, a repository of the living history so deftly and thoroughly chronicled here.

Download or read book Great Basin Indians written by Michael Hittman and published by University of Nevada Press. This book was released on 2013-06-15 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Native American inhabitants of North America’s Great Basin have a long, eventful history and rich cultures. Great Basin Indians: An Encyclopedic History covers all aspects of their world. The book is organized in an encyclopedic format to allow full discussion of many diverse topics, including geography, religion, significant individuals, the impact of Euro-American settlement, wars, tribes and intertribal relations, reservations, federal policies regarding Native Americans, scholarly theories regarding their prehistory, and others. Author Michael Hittman employs a vast range of archival and secondary sources as well as interviews, and he addresses the fruits of such recent methodologies as DNA analysis and gender studies that offer new insights into the lives and history of these enduring inhabitants of one of North America’s most challenging environments. Great Basin Indians is an essential resource for any reader interested in the Native peoples of the American West and in western history in general.

Download or read book The Unquiet Nisei written by D. Bahr and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-12-09 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An oral-history-based biography of a seminal Asian-American activist. The book traces Embrey's life from her youth in the Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles, to her harrowing experiences in the Japanese internment camps, to her many decades of passionate advocacy on behalf of her fellow internees.

Download or read book Bishop written by Pam Vaughan and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Located in the stark landscape of Eastern California's Owens Valley, Bishop is situated between two of the highest mountain ranges of the contiguous United States. Native Americans had been in the region since antiquity, and white settlers began to filter in after many battles with the Paiutes and Shoshones. Bishop was named after Sam Bishop, who drove cattle into the area and settled along Bishop Creek. Many more farmers and ranchers followed. To the south, Los Angeles was growing too, tapping the Owens River for a gravity-fed aqueduct for its residents; thus began the Los Angeles-Owens Valley Water Conflict.

Download or read book Marie Mason Potts written by Terri A. Castaneda and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in the northern region of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Marie Mason Potts (1895–1978), a Mountain Maidu woman, became one of the most influential California Indian activists of her generation. In this illuminating book, Terri A. Castaneda explores Potts’s rich life story, from her formative years in off-reservation boarding schools, through marriage and motherhood, and into national spheres of Native American politics and cultural revitalization. During the early twentieth century, federal Indian policy imposed narrow restrictions on the dreams and aspirations of young Native girls. Castaneda demonstrates how Marie initially accepted these limitations and how, with determined resolve, she broke free of them. As a young student at Greenville Indian Industrial school, Marie navigated conditions that were perilous, even deadly, for many of her peers. Yet she excelled academically, and her adventurous spirit and intellectual ambition led her to transfer to Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School. After graduating in 1915, Marie Potts returned home, married a former schoolmate, and worked as a domestic laborer. Racism and socioeconomic inequality were inescapable, and Castaneda chronicles Potts’s growing political consciousness within the urban milieu of Sacramento. Against this backdrop, the author analyzes Potts’s significant work for the Federated Indians of California (FIC) and her thirty-year tenure as editor and publisher of the Smoke Signal newspaper. Potts’s voluminous correspondence documents her steadfast conviction that California Indians deserved just compensation for their stolen ancestral lands, a decent standard of living, the right to practice their traditions, and political agency in their own affairs. Drawing extensively from this trove of writings, Castaneda privileges Potts’s own voice in the telling of her story and offers a valuable history of California Indians in the twentieth century.

Download or read book The Faults of the Owens Valley written by Sid Gardner and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2009-12 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Faults of the Owens Valley is both a murder mystery and reflections on the history of the Owens Valley. A serial killer disrupts the lives of the major characters, but the landscape and the history of the Valley are also major forces, including the water wars, tensions among tribal communities and waves of later immigrants, and conflicts between the environment and economic development. The major characters-two sheriff's deputies, a local businessman and restaurant owner, a minister, a truck repairman, and a high school teacher-respond in different ways to the killings, which eventually threaten their own lives and livelihood. The killer skillfully plays on Valley residents' hopes and fears, leading to an explosive conclusion. The historic events of the Bishop Creek battle of 1862, the Aqueduct, and Manzanar are all highlighted in the book's geography. An afterword by the author explains the interweaving of fact and fiction in the novel.

Download or read book Voices from This Long Brown Land written by NA NA and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this engaging oral history, residents of California's scenic, sparsely-populated Owens Valley reflect on their varied experiences with the region's turbulent past. Contested themes of Native American removal, water transfers, and wartime internment are interwoven with remembrances of the valley's multicultural communities, its cattle ranching and agriculture, and its Western filmmaking, railroad, and mining enterprises. Together, author and narrators create an accessible and richly textured work of history, memory, and place.

Download or read book The Imperial Church written by Katherine D. Moran and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a fascinating discussion of religion's role in the rhetoric of American civilizing empire, The Imperial Church undertakes an exploration of how Catholic mission histories served as a useful reference for Americans narrating US settler colonialism on the North American continent and seeking to extend military, political, and cultural power around the world. Katherine D. Moran traces historical celebrations of Catholic missionary histories in the upper Midwest, Southern California, and the US colonial Philippines to demonstrate the improbable centrality of the Catholic missions to ostensibly Protestant imperial endeavors. Moran shows that, as the United States built its continental and global dominion and an empire of production and commerce in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Protestant and Catholic Americans began to celebrate Catholic imperial pasts. She demonstrates that American Protestants joined their Catholic compatriots in speaking with admiration about historical Catholic missionaries: the Jesuit Jacques Marquette in the Midwest, the Franciscan Junípero Serra in Southern California, and the Spanish friars in the Philippines. Comparing them favorably to the Puritans, Pilgrims, and the American Revolutionary generation, commemorators drew these missionaries into a cross-confessional pantheon of US national and imperial founding fathers. In the process, they cast Catholic missionaries as gentle and effective agents of conquest, uplift, and economic growth, arguing that they could serve as both origins and models for an American civilizing empire. The Imperial Church connects Catholic history and the history of US empire by demonstrating that the religious dimensions of American imperial rhetoric have been as cross-confessional as the imperial nation itself.

Download or read book Native Students at Work written by Kevin Whalen and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Native Students at Work tells the stories of Native people from around the American Southwest who participated in labor programs at Sherman Institute, a federal Indian boarding school in Riverside, California. The school placed young Native men and women in and around Los Angeles as domestic workers, farmhands, and factory laborers. For the first time, historian Kevin Whalen reveals the challenges these students faced as they left their homes for boarding schools and then endured an “outing program” that aimed to strip them of their identities and cultures by sending them to live and work among non-Native people. Tracing their journeys, Whalen shows how male students faced low pay and grueling conditions on industrial farms near the edge of the city, yet still made more money than they could near their reservations. Similarly, many young women serving as domestic workers in Los Angeles made the best of their situations by tapping into the city’s Indigenous social networks and even enrolling in its public schools. As Whalen reveals, despite cruel working conditions, Native people used the outing program to their advantage whenever they could, forming urban indigenous communities and sharing money and knowledge gained in the city with those back home. A mostly overlooked chapter in Native American and labor histories, Native Students at Work deepens our understanding of the boarding school experience and sheds further light on Native American participation in the workforce.

Download or read book Encounters with the World s Religions written by Brad Karelius and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A spectacular stretch of earth, the Eastern Sierra region of California reveals volcanic reefs, desert sand dunes, majestic mountains, and snow-fed lakes and rivers. Drawing on forty years of college teaching on the world's religions, Professor Brad Karelius is your guide, uncovering deep spiritual dimensions in this achingly beautiful place. This book shares crystallizations of religious wisdom collected through the ages, and finely tuned descriptions of holy sites, which you may visit, that will draw you deeper in your personal encounters with world spiritualities.

Download or read book Education for Extinction written by David Wallace Adams and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2020-06-10 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last "Indian War" was fought against Native American children in the dormitories and classrooms of government boarding schools. Only by removing Indian children from their homes for extended periods of time, policymakers reasoned, could white "civilization" take root while childhood memories of "savagism" gradually faded to the point of extinction. In the words of one official: "Kill the Indian and save the man." This fully revised edition of Education for Extinction offers the only comprehensive account of this dispiriting effort, and incorporates the last twenty-five years of scholarship. Much more than a study of federal Indian policy, this book vividly details the day-to-day experiences of Indian youth living in a "total institution" designed to reconstruct them both psychologically and culturally. The assault on identity came in many forms: the shearing off of braids, the assignment of new names, uniformed drill routines, humiliating punishments, relentless attacks on native religious beliefs, patriotic indoctrinations, suppression of tribal languages, Victorian gender rituals, football contests, and industrial training. Especially poignant is Adams's description of the ways in which students resisted or accommodated themselves to forced assimilation. Many converted to varying degrees, but others plotted escapes, committed arson, and devised ingenious strategies of passive resistance. Adams also argues that many of those who seemingly cooperated with the system were more than passive players in this drama, that the response of accommodation was not synonymous with cultural surrender. This is especially apparent in his analysis of students who returned to the reservation. He reveals the various ways in which graduates struggled to make sense of their lives and selectively drew upon their school experience in negotiating personal and tribal survival in a world increasingly dominated by white men. The discussion comes full circle when Adams reviews the government's gradual retreat from the assimilationist vision. Partly because of persistent student resistance, but also partly because of a complex and sometimes contradictory set of progressive, humanitarian, and racist motivations, policymakers did eventually come to view boarding schools less enthusiastically. Based upon extensive use of government archives, Indian and teacher autobiographies, and school newspapers, Adams's moving account is essential reading for scholars and general readers alike interested in Western history, Native American studies, American race relations, education history, and multiculturalism.