Indigenous Studies

Highlights the current scholarship emerging from these scholars of higher education. From understanding how Native American students make their way through school, to tracking tribal college and university transfer students, this book allows Native scholars to take center stage, and shines the light squarely on those least represented among us.

Despite progress, the Western higher education system is still largely dominated by scholars from the privileged classes of the Global North. This book presents examples of efforts to diversify points of view, include previously excluded people, and decolonize curricula. What has worked? What hasn't? What further visions do we need? How can we bring about a more democratic and just academic life for all? Written by scholars from different disciplines, countries, and backgrounds, this book offers an internationally relevant, practical guide to 'doing diversity' in the social sciences and humanities and decolonizing higher education as a whole.

This book approaches notions of Being, Interculturality and New Knowledge Systems, through a team of expert contributors who share their evidence-based knowledge. It attempts to address the missing connections between what is recognized as ‘global knowledge’ and the underrepresented knowledges that are constructed across higher education.

Presents a list of ethical guidelines to follow when researching and writing about Natives, including the goals of the writer, stereotypes to avoid, and cultural issues to consider.

The Handbook of Critical Methodologies covers everything from the history of critical and indigenous theory and how it came to inform and impact qualitative research and indigenous peoples to the critical constructs themselves, including race/diversity, gender representation (queer theory, feminism), culture, and politics to the meaning of "critical" concepts within specific disciplines (critical psychology, critical communication/mass communication, media studies, cultural studies, political economy, education, sociology, anthropology, history, etc. - all in an effort to define emancipatory research and explore what critical qualitative research can do for social change and social justice.

A compilation of conceptual chapters and national case studies that includes empirical research based on a series of data collection methods. It also offers a strategic comparative and international education policy statement on recent shifts in indigenous education, and new approaches to explore, develop, and improve comparative education and policy research globally. Contributing authors examine several social justice issues related to indigenous education.

The purpose of this book is to move beyond the asterisk in an effort to better understand Native students, challenge the status quo, and provide an informed base for leaders in student and academic affairs, and administrators concerned with the success of students on their campuses. The authors of this book share their understanding of Native epistemologies, culture, and social structures, offering student affairs professionals and institutions a richer array of options, resources, and culturally-relevant and inclusive models to better serve this population.

This book presents models and examples of pathways to success that align with Native American students' aspirations and cultural values. The contributors to this book highlight Indigenized college access programs--meaning programs developed by, not just for--the Indigenous community, and are adapted, or developed, for the unique Indigenous populations they serve.

This edited volume is the result of a collaborative project of Indigenous graduate education training and higher education-tribal institution partnerships in the southwestern United States. We feature the work of interdisciplinary scholars writing about local peoples, issues, and knowledges that demonstrate rich linkages between universities and Indigenous communities. Collectively, as Indigenous peoples writing, this work takes the opportunity to explore why and how Indigenous peoples are working to reframe dominant limits of our power and to shift educational efforts from the colonial back to an Indigenous center.

Between A.D. 1000 and 1635, the inhabitants of southwestern Pennsylvania and portions of adjacent states--known to archaeologists as the Monongahela Culture or Tradition--began to reside regularly in ring-shaped village settlements. These circular settlements consisted of dwellings around a central plaza. A cross-cultural and cross-temporal review of archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic cases demonstrates that this settlement form appeared repeatedly and independently worldwide, including throughout portions of the Eastern Woodlands, among the Plains Indians, and in Central and South America.   Specific archaeological cases are drawn from Somerset County, Pennsylvania, that has the largest number of completely excavated Monongahela villages. Most of these villages, excavated in the 1930s as federal relief projects, were recently dated. Full analysis of the extensive excavations reveals not only the geometric architectural patterning of the villages, but enables an analysis of the social groupings, population estimates, and economic status of residents who inhabited the circular villages. Circular patterning can be revealed at less fully excavated archaeological sites. Focused test excavations can help confirm circular village plans without extensive and destructive excavations.

In this book, twenty-one researchers in interwoven efforts immerse themselves and the reader in this vibrant archaeological record in order to richly reconstruct the societies, rituals, and ritual interactions of Hopewellian peoples. By finding the faces, actions, and motivations of Hopewellian peoples as individuals who constructed knowable social roles, the authors explore, in a personalized and locally contextualized manner, the details of Hopewellian life: leadership, its sacred and secular power bases, recruitment, and formalization over time; systems of social ranking and prestige; animal-totemic clan organization, kinship structures, and sodalities; gender roles, prestige, work load, and health; community organization in its tri-scalar residential, symbolic, and demographic forms; intercommunity alliances and changes in their strategies and expanses over time; and interregional travels.

Offers a fresh interpretation of the history of the Delaware, or Lenape, Indians in the context of events in the mid-Atlantic region and the Ohio Valley.

In The Nature and Pace of Change in American Indian Cultures, eight expert contributors examine the Transitional period in Pennsylvania and posit potential explanations of the significant changes in social and cultural life at that time. Building upon sixty years of accumulated data, corrected radiocarbon dating, and fresh research, scholars are reimagining the ancient environment in which native people lived.

Overview of the archaeological record of Native Americans in Pennsylvania from early prehistory through the Paleoindian, Archaic, Transitional, Woodland, and Contact periods, stretching from 16,500 years ago to 1750 C.E. The authors present and analyze specific traits of each archaeological time period covered and use the archaeological record to provide a glimpse of Native Americans' daily life in Pennsylvania. First Pennsylvanians also includes personal stories and anecdotes from archaeologists about their experiences in the field as well as a wealth of illustrations and diagrams. The chapters examine the environment, social groups, tools, subsistence, and settlement patterns of Native Americans in Pennsylvania and describe how these factors profoundly affected the populations and cultures of these early inhabitants of the region.

The story of Native peoples' resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community's rich history of activism Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle.

Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining thousands of acres of their homeland in what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and U.S. development in the Old Northwest. Telling the stories of mixed-race traders and missionaries, tribal leaders and territorial governors, Witgen challenges our assumptions about the inevitability of U.S. expansion.