Indigenous Men and Masculinities


Book Description

What do we know of masculinities in non-patriarchal societies? Indigenous peoples of the Americas and beyond come from traditions of gender equity, complementarity, and the sacred feminine, concepts that were unimaginable and shocking to Euro-western peoples at contact. "Indigenous Men and Masculinities", edited by Kim Anderson and Robert Alexander Innes, brings together prominent thinkers to explore the meaning of masculinities and being a man within such traditions, further examining the colonial disruption and imposition of patriarchy on Indigenous men. Building on Indigenous knowledge systems, Indigenous feminism, and queer theory, the sixteen essays by scholars and activists from Canada, the U.S., and New Zealand open pathways for the nascent field of Indigenous masculinities. The authors explore subjects of representation through art and literature, as well as Indigenous masculinities in sport, prisons, and gangs. "Indigenous Men and Masculinities" highlights voices of Indigenous male writers, traditional knowledge keepers, ex-gang members, war veterans, fathers, youth, two-spirited people, and Indigenous men working to end violence against women. It offers a refreshing vision toward equitable societies that celebrate healthy and diverse masculinities.




Alaska Native Art


Book Description

The rich artistic traditions of Alaska Natives are the subject of this landmark volume, which examines the work of the premier Alaska artists of the twentieth century. Ranging across the state from the islands of the Bering Sea to the interior forests, Alaska Native Art provides a living context for beadwork and ivory carving, basketry and skin sewing. Examples of work from Tlingit, Aleutian Islanders, Pacific Eskimo, Athabascan, Yupik, and Inupiaq artists make this volume the most comprehensive study of Alaskan art ever published. Alaska Native Art examines the concept of tradition in the modern world. Alaska Native Art is a volume to treasure, a tribute to the incredible vision of Alaska's artists and to the enduring traditions of all of Alaska's Native peoples.




Health and Social Issues of Native American Women


Book Description

This book serves as a much-needed source of information on the social and health issues that impact the health of Native American women in the United States, accompanied by invaluable historical, cultural, and other contextual data about this sociocultural group. Health and Social Issues of Native American Women is the first book that specifically explores and discusses health and related social issues within the world of Native American women, providing strong historical and cultural perspectives as well as other contextual information that is often missing or misrepresented in other works about Native American women. Comprising contributions from mostly Native American women scholars, the work presents key background information on native women's health, health care delivery systems, and sociocultural history, and its chapters address the changing role of native women in Alaska and other parts of Indian country. Each author taps her specific area of expertise and knowledge to spotlight specific native women's health problems, such as nutrition, aging, domestic violence, diabetes, and substance abuse.




Traditional, National, and International Law and Indigenous Communities


Book Description

This volume of the Indigenous Justice series explores the global effects of marginalizing Indigenous law. The essays in this book argue that European-based law has been used to force Indigenous peoples to assimilate, has politically disenfranchised Indigenous communities, and has destroyed traditional Indigenous social institutions. European-based law not only has been used as a tool to infringe upon Indigenous human rights, it also has been used throughout global history to justify environmental injustices, treaty breaking, and massacres. The research in this volume focuses on the resurgence of traditional law, tribal–state relations in the United States, laws that have impacted Native American women, laws that have failed to protect Indigenous sacred sites, the effect of international conventions on domestic laws, and the role of community justice organizations in operationalizing international law. While all of these issues are rooted in colonization, Indigenous peoples are using their own solutions to demonstrate the resilience, persistence, and innovation of their communities. With chapters focusing on the use and misuse of law as it pertains to Indigenous peoples in North America, Latin America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, this book offers a wide scope of global injustice. Despite proof of oppressive legal practices concerning Indigenous peoples worldwide, this book also provides hope for amelioration of colonial consequences.




Reproduction on the Reservation


Book Description

This pathbreaking book documents the transformation of reproductive practices and politics on Indian reservations from the late nineteenth century to the present, integrating a localized history of childbearing, motherhood, and activism on the Crow Reservation in Montana with an analysis of trends affecting Indigenous women more broadly. As Brianna Theobald illustrates, the federal government and local authorities have long sought to control Indigenous families and women's reproduction, using tactics such as coercive sterilization and removal of Indigenous children into the white foster care system. But Theobald examines women's resistance, showing how they have worked within families, tribal networks, and activist groups to confront these issues. Blending local and intimate family histories with the histories of broader movements such as WARN (Women of All Red Nations), Theobald links the federal government's intrusion into Indigenous women's reproductive and familial decisions to the wider history of eugenics and the reproductive rights movement. She argues convincingly that colonial politics have always been--and remain--reproductive politics. By looking deeply at one tribal nation over more than a century, Theobald offers an especially rich analysis of how Indigenous women experienced pregnancy and motherhood under evolving federal Indian policy. At the heart of this history are the Crow women who displayed creativity and fortitude in struggling for reproductive self-determination.




Understanding Indigenous Gender Relations and Violence


Book Description

This book focuses on the inequities that are persistently and disproportionately severe for Indigenous peoples. Gender and racial based inequities span from the home life to Indigenous women’s wellness—including physical, mental, and social health. The conundrum of how and why Indigenous women—many of whom historically held respected and even held sacred status in many matrilineal and female-centered communities—now experience the highest rates of gendered based violence is focal to this work. Unlike Western European and colonial contexts, Indigenous societies tended to be organized in fundamentally distinct ways that were woman-centered and where gender roles and values were reportedly more egalitarian, fluid, flexible, inclusive, complementary, and harmonious. Understanding how Indigenous gender relations were targeted as a tool of patriarchal settler colonization and how this relates to women more broadly can be a key to unlocking gender liberation—a catalyst for readers to become ‘gender AWAke.’ Living gender AWAke encompasses living in alignment with agility (AWA) with clear awareness of how gender and other sociostructural factors affect daily life, as well as how to navigate such factors. To live in alignment, is to live from ones’ center and in accordance with one’s authentic self, with agility, by nimbly responding to life’s constantly shifting situations. This empirically grounded work extends and deepens the Indigenist framework of historical oppression, resilience, and transcendence (FHORT) by delving deep into the resilience, transcendence, and wellness components of FHORT while centering gender. Understanding the changing gender roles for Indigenous peoples over time fosters decolonization more broadly by enabling greater understanding of how sexism and misogyny hurt people across personal and political spheres. This understanding can foster the process of becoming gender AWAke by identifying and dismantling of sexism and by becoming decolonized from prescriptive gender roles that inhibit living in alignment with one’s true or authentic self. Readers will gain: a research-based approach linking historical oppression, gender-based inequities, and violence against Indigenous women understanding of how patriarchal colonialism undermines all genders a tool to dismantle sexism more broadly pathways to become Gender AWAke through the understanding of Indigenous women's resilience and transcendence




Men, Masculinities and Disaster


Book Description

In the examination of gender as a driving force in disasters, too little attention has been paid to how women’s or men’s disaster experiences relate to the wider context of gender inequality, or how gender-just practice can help prevent disasters or address climate change at a structural level. With a foreword from Kenneth Hewitt, an afterword from Raewyn Connell and contributions from renowned international experts, this book helps address the gap. It explores disasters in diverse environmental, hazard, political and cultural contexts through original research and theoretical reflection, building on the under-utilized orientation of critical men’s studies. This body of thought, not previously applied in disaster contexts, explores how men gain, maintain and use power to assert control over women. Contributing authors examine the gender terrain of disasters 'through men's eyes,' considering how diverse forms of masculinities shape men’s efforts to respond to and recover from disasters and other climate challenges. The book highlights both the high costs paid by many men in disasters and the consequences of dominant masculinity practices for women and marginalized men. It concludes by examining how disaster risk can be reduced through men's diverse efforts to challenge hierarchies around gender, sexuality, disability, age and culture.




Women and Power in Native North America


Book Description

Power is understood to be manifested in a multiplicity of ways: through cosmology, economic control, and formal hierarchy. In the Native societies examined, power is continually created and redefined through individual life stages and through the history of the society. The important issue is autonomy - whether, or to what extent, individuals are autonomous in living their lives. Each author demonstrates that women in a particular cultural area of aboriginal North America had (and have) more power than many previous observers have claimed.




Mental Health


Book Description




Many Faces of Gender


Book Description

Many Faces of Gender: Roles and Relationships through Time in Indigenous Northern Communities is an interdisciplinary volume that addresses the dearth in descriptions and analyses of gender roles and relationships in Native societies in North America's boreal reaches. This collection complements existing conceptual frameworks and develops new methodological and theoretical approaches that more fully articulate the complex nature of social, economic, political, and material relationships between indigenous men and women in this region. The contributors challenge the widespread notion that Native women's and men's roles are frozen in time, a concept precluding the possibility of differently constructed gender categories and changing power relations and roles through time. By examining the prehistorical, historical, and modern records, they demonstrate that these roles are not fixed and have indeed gradually transformed. Many Faces of Gender: Roles and Relationships through Time in Indigenous Northern Communities is ideal for anthropologists and archaeologists interested in cross-disciplinary studies of gender, households, women, and lithics. With Contributions By: Lillian Ackerman Hetty Jo Brumbach Barbara Crass Lisa Frink Brian Hoffman Robert Jarvenpa Carol Zane Jolles Gregory Reinhardt Rita Shepard Henry Stewart Jennifer Ann Tobey Peter Whitridge