Households And Families Of The Longhouse Iroquois At Six Nations Reserve

This study of kinship relations, economics, and household organization among the modern Longhouse Iroquois, located in Ontario, Canada, fills a crucial gap in our knowledge of modern Iroquoian culture and history and provides a treasury of information about Longhouse social organization. Founded by nearly two thousand Iroquois allies of the British crown in 1784, the Six Nations Reserve became the first Iroquoian community to contain members of all five tribes of the original Iroquois Confederacy. By the mid-twentieth century, the reserve had divided along the lines of politics and religion into two distinct social groups, those who practiced Christianity and the followers of the more traditional Longhouse religion. In the late 1950s, Merlin G. Myers conducted fieldwork among these traditionalists. He collected data on household structure and kinship relations from 150 families and interpreted his findings within the context of structural-functional anthropology, providing a rare example of British anthropological theory from this time applied to a North American Native community. His work also features valuable Cayuga linguistic contributions.

Discusses the Iroquois Indians, focusing on their tradition of building longhouses. Includes a recipe for maple candy and instructions for making a braided raffia wristband.

Looks at the customs, family life, history, government, culture, and daily life of the Iroquois nations of New York and Ontario.

Shimony's classic work clearly shows the contemporary cultural and religious crises that face the Longhouse Iroquois at the Six Nations Reserve, Ontario.

In Seven Generations of Iroquois Leadership, Laurence M. Hauptman traces the past 200 years of the Six Nations’ history through the lens of the remarkable leaders who shaped it. Focusing on the distinct qualities of Iroquois leadership, Hauptman reveals how the Six Nations have survived in the face of overwhelming pressure. Celebrated figures such as Governor Blacksnake, Cornelius Cusick, and Deskaheh are juxtaposed with less well-known but nonetheless influential champions of Iroquoian culture and sovereignty such as Dinah John. Hauptman’s survey includes over thirty contemporary women, highlighting the important role female leaders have played in Iroquois survival throughout history to the present day. The book offers historical and contemporary portraits of leaders from all six Iroquois nations and all regions of modern-day Iroquoia.

Echoing and expanding the aims of the first volume, Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art, this second volume contains illuminating global Indigenous visualities concerning First Nations, Aboriginal Australian, Maori, and Sami peoples. This insightful collection of essays explores how identity is created and communicated through Indigenous film-, video-, and art-making; what role these practices play in contemporary cultural revitalization; and how indigenous creators revisit media pasts and resignify dominant discourses through their work. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Visualities Two draws on American Indian studies, film studies, art history, cultural studies, visual culture studies, women’s studies, and postcolonial studies. Among the artists and media makers examined are Tasha Hubbard, Rachel Perkins, and Ehren “Bear Witness” Thomas, as well as contemporary Inuit artists and Indigenous agents of cultural production working to reimagine digital and social platforms. Films analyzed include The Exiles, Winter in the Blood, The Spirit of Annie Mae, Radiance, One Night the Moon, Bran Nue Dae, Ngati, Shimásání, and Sami Blood.

This is an analysis of four structurally related rituals of the Longhouse Iroquois of Southern Ontario: the Thanksgiving Address, the Great Feather Dance, the Skin Dance and the Tobacco Invocation. Transcribed and translated texts are included as appendices.

Alice C. Fletcher (1838–1923), one of the few women who became anthropologists in the United States during the nineteenth century, was a pioneer in the practice of participant-observation ethnography. She focused her studies over many years among the Native tribes in Nebraska and South Dakota. Life among the Indians, Fletcher’s popularized autobiographical memoir written in 1886–87 about her first fieldwork among the Sioux and the Omahas during 1881–82, remained unpublished in Fletcher’s archives at the Smithsonian Institution for more than one hundred years. In it Fletcher depicts the humor and hardships of her field experiences as a middle-aged woman undertaking anthropological fieldwork alone, while showing genuine respect and compassion for Native ways and beliefs that was far ahead of her time. What emerges is a complex and fascinating picture of a woman questioning the cultural and gender expectations of nineteenth-century America while insightfully portraying rapidly changing reservation life. Fletcher’s account of her early fieldwork is available here for the first time, accompanied by an essay by the editors that sheds light on Fletcher’s place in the development of anthropology and the role of women in the discipline.

This innovative text explores the unprecedented changes in the realms of politics, demography, economics, culture, knowledge, and kinship that women have brought about in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Global in reach, the book provides a comparative analysis of developments worldwide to show both progress as well as new tensions and forms of inequality that have emerged out of women’s entry into politics, wage employment, education, and the production of culture. Beginning with suffrage and moving to participation in international movements—such as anti-war, labor, and environmental rights activism—Maria Bucur explores how women have transformed the operation of states and international institutions. She focuses on the radical demographic shifts since 1900 through the prism of changing practices in women’s sexuality, from birth control practices to education. Examining the continuing economic gender gap around the world, Bucur highlights ways women have been both beneficiaries of new economic opportunities and participants in developing new forms of inequality. Considering the remarkable achievements of women in the areas of knowledge making and cultural production, the author shifts her gaze toward the future and what these changes mean in terms of gender norms and evolving kinship relations. She thus presents a new perspective on contemporary world history, centered on how women have become both the subjects and objects of seismic shifts in the political, social, and economic structures of societies across the globe.

Describes the way of life of the tribes that made up the League of the Iroquois, focusing on their longhouses, unique dwellings they built for shelter and ceremonies.