Browsing by Subject "Indigenous"
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Item After the Conquest: The Survival of Indigenous Patterns of Life and Belief(1989) Karttunen, FrancesItem The Ancient Maya Craft Community at Colha, Belize, and Its External Relationships(1989) Hester, Tomas R.; Shafer, Harry J.Item Becoming I’x : Maya ontological decolonization and the turn to theater in postwar Guatemala(2017-05) Thelen, Czarina Faith; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Vargas, Joao H.; Sturm, Circe; Jones, Omi Osun Joni L; Speed, Shannon; TallBear, KimThis dissertation examines theater’s capacity to communicate Maya ontologies and nurture cultural-political imaginaries among rural Mayas engaged in decolonization politics. In response to the highly exclusionary Guatemalan state and the 1980s genocide of Mayas, and coinciding with continent-wide Indigenous protests against quincentennial celebrations of Columbus’ arrival to the Americas in 1992, a vibrant Maya Kaqchikel movement emerged in Sololá, Guatemala. This rural grassroots movement of farmers and schoolteachers, which I call Tejido Social (Social Fabric), demonstrated an enormous capacity for mobilization around a range of issues including recovering ancestral land, expelling a military base, building a bilingual Kaqchikel community school, and revitalizing the practice of Maya customary law and governance. Beginning in 1999, a local political party sought to incorporate the Tejido Social movement, at times using tactics of intimidation and violence. In 2000, children of Tejido Social leaders, curious about aspects of Maya culture and ontology that had been repressed by genocide and colonization, took another approach. Turning away from broad grassroots organizing through village networks, they express a politics of reivindicación (cultural dignification and vindication) through theater. Through an ethnography of rehearsals, theater productions, and audience responses to the theater group Sotz’il, I analyze what Sotz’il’s theater performances do for performers and audiences. Extending Hirschkind’s concept of “ethical soundscapes,” I contend that Sotz’il shapes Maya worlds through theater. This research finds that Sotz’il’s theater performances evoke sensory memories of Maya ontology and lifeways. I contend that by awakening an emotional connection to everyday rural Maya experience, Sotz’il strengthens audiences’ ethicopolitical commitment to Maya reivindicación. Sotz’il’s project, however, stands in tension with the maintenance of the village networks that are central to Indigenous communities’ mobilizing power, leaving open questions about its future amidst repression. By exploring this tension I seek to rethink subaltern politics more generally, beyond social movements as a political formation, to conceptualize processes through which subaltern peoples internalize and emotionally attach to – and then mobilize around – identity-based causes and values.Item Bolivian Andean textiles, commercialization and modernity(2013-05) Richardson, Natalie Lila; Speed, Shannon, 1964-In research, we frequently position “modernity” against “tradition” to explain cultural changes within the indigenous realm. Such is the case of Andean textile studies, where commercialization and modernity are frequently attributed to the decline in Andean communities’ production and donning of hand-woven textiles. By doing this, we distance ourselves from the underlying issues causing these changes: poverty, discrimination, ethnic social stratification, etc. Also, by positioning “modernity” outside and against the indigenous realm, we contribute to the notion that modernity belongs to the western world alone and can only be achieved by Western influence. In doing so, we confine Andean textiles to a static notion of identity and ignore and antagonize the creative strategies that weavers’ use, moving outside of this notion. My work questions the “tradition” versus “modernity” binary by analyzing its history and first appearance in Bolivian Andean textile scholarship, and by analyzing changes within Andean textiles between the Inca and Colonial periods. My study also sheds light on the workings of internal colonialism within Andean textiles in the Bolivian regions of Jalq’a and Tarabuco.Item Decolonizing the archive in contemporary American Indian and Mexican American literature(2016-03-24) Lederman, Emily Ann; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Gonzalez, John M; Minich, Julie A; Campbell, CraigThis dissertation examines twentieth and twenty-first century American Indian and Mexican American novels and short stories that decolonize the archive through Indigenous and queer archives and archival practices. Historical documents such as colonial maps and newspaper clippings appear within the pages of these texts, and characters engage with objects and ephemera to access and assemble histories of settler colonial violence, tribal politics and culture, and queer lineages. Beyond filling in the gaps of the colonial archive, these texts challenge the epistemologies and power structures that sustain a colonial conception of the archive. Disrupting understandings of an archive as an institutional repository that contains a stable and objective past, they further work of the interdisciplinary archival turn of the past two decades and emphasize the importance of understanding historical and contemporary sociopolitical realities through the lens of a decolonized archive. My first chapter theorizes what I call “archival sovereignty,” demonstrating how American Indian texts such as LeAnne Howe’s Miko Kings (2007), as well as novels by Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and N. Scott Momaday, repurpose materials of the colonial archive within Indigenous epistemological frames. Exploring the limitations and possibilities of archival recovery, my second chapter reads queer archival practices in Felicia Luna Lemus’s Like Son (2007) and considers the politics of recovering Indigenous histories in Mexican and Mexican American contexts. Bringing together the theoretical threads of my first two chapters, my third chapter explains how Indigenous and queer archival practices strengthen tribal community bonds in Greg Sarris’s Watermelon Nights (1998), and contextualizes this novel within Sarris’s tribal political career and the politics of tribal citizenship. In conclusion, I analyze Manuel Muñoz’s “Lindo y Querido” (2007) and Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s “He Has Gone to Be With the Women” (2012) to consider how those undocumented and disappeared in the official record are remembered through queer archival practices that underscore the affective and political necessity of reimagining the content and form of the archive.Item Discourse forms and social categorization in Cha'palaa(2010-05) Floyd, Simeon Isaac; Epps, Patience, 1973-; Sherzer, Joel; Hale, Charles R.; Pierre, Jemima; England, NoraThis dissertation is an ethnographic study of race and other forms of social categorization as approached through the discourse of the indigenous Chachi people of northwestern lowland Ecuador and their Afro-descendant neighbors. It combines the ethnographic methods of social anthropology with the methods of descriptive linguistics, letting social questions about racial formation guide linguistic inquiry. It provides new information about the largely unstudied indigenous South American language Cha’palaa, and connects that information about linguistic form to problems of the study of race and ethnicity in Latin America. Individual descriptive chapters address how the Cha’palaa number system is based on collectivity rather than plurality according to an animacy hierarchy that codes only human and human-like social collectivities, how a nominal set of ethnonyms linked to Chachi oral history become the recipients of collective marking as human collectivities, how those collectivities are co-referentially linked to speech participants through the deployment of the pronominal system, and how the multi-modal resource of gesture adds to these rich resources supplied by the spoken language for the expression of social realities like race. The final chapters address Chachi and Afro-descendant discourses in dialogue with each other and examine naturally occurring speech data to show how the linguistic forms described in previous chapters are used in social interaction. The central argument advances a position that takes the socially constructed status of race seriously and considers that for such constructions to exist as more abstract macro-categories they must be constituted by instances of social interaction, where elements of the social order are observable at the micro-level. In this way localized articulations of social categories become vehicles for the broader circulation of discourses structured by a history of racialized social inequality, revealing the extreme depth of racialization in human social conditioning. This dissertation represents a contribution to the field of linguistic anthropology as well as to descriptive linguistics of South American languages and to critical approaches to race and ethnicity in Latin America.Item Ethnic Emergence and Expansion in Central America(1988) Adams, Richard N.Item Ethnic Images and Strategies in 1944(1988) Adams, Richard N.Item Expansion, adaptation, and exclusion : Texas and the eastern North American borderlands, 1763-1845(2023-12) Cox, Sheena Lee; Buenger, Walter L., 1951-; Smith, Foster T; Bsumek, Erika; Zamora, EmilioThis dissertation examines the process of American Indian removal across eastern North America and into Texas from 1763-1845. I examine treaties, personal letters, diaries, legislation, and government documentation to show how American Indian removal was an essential component of American expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries. After the first Treaty of Paris, American Indians, and native Mexicans, like all groups who encountered chaotic circumstances, resisted, or adapted to the changing nature of relationships in their regions as the borders and power dynamics fluctuated. I argue that the theft and sale of American Indian land contributed to the rapid economic development of the United States and became more aggressively violent after the 1815 Creek War, which eliminated significant Indigenous resistance in the Old Northwest and the South at the same time the European competition became severely weakened and removed from much of North America. Furthermore, I show how the theory of Indigenous incorporation into American society was never meaningfully attempted, and methods of exclusion were supported and more common practice by the time Americans first settled in Texas.Item Forced indigenous perpetrators : the civil-defense patrols in Guatemala, 1981-1996(2022-09-14) Markarian, Vasken Gregory; Garrard, Virginia, 1957-; Twinam Villalon, Ann; Garfield, Seth; Sanford, VictoriaThis dissertation addresses violence against neighbors and civil war the context of Guatemala's internal armed conflict in the early 1980s. Embroiled in a counterinsurgency war against guerrilla rebel armies, the Guatemalan state-military committed mass state violence against civilians it suspected of being "subversives" and guerrillas. A major tool in this state violence was the "civil defense patrols," forcibly recruited indigenous and campesino (peasant) men into rural militias on the side of the state. But in the aftermath of a genocide against Guatemala's indigenous population, many of these "forced participants" had blood on their hands. How did Guatemalans turn against their own people? This dissertation argues that, coupled with the overwhelming pressure to follow orders, perpetrators and victims acted in subtle and explicit ways to negotiate the terms of forced participation, to carry out orders to commit violence, or to resist them in some way. More than just robotically following orders, civil patrollers found ways to affirm or negate the lives of their neighbors and innocent civilians. When they did, they based their actions on Army protocols as well as their own interpretations of them, their own meanings, and their own "cultural logics" rooted in their local context.Item Four winds across three campuses : indigenous community building in higher education(2021-11-30) Pyle, Aaron; Reddick, Richard, 1972-; Sturm, Circe; Urrieta, Luis; Jabbar, Huriya; Garces, LilianaThis study examines how Indigenous people build communities in higher education settings. This focus frames the impact of connectivity on identity development through a correlation between cultural accessibility and improved post-secondary success for this population. The research centers on three institutions: The University of Texas at Austin, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, and Queen’s University. Separate chapters are dedicated to each campus in order to emphasize the great variation of Indigenous identity across the North American continent and to reflect various opportunities for manifestations of cultural connectivity. Research is also included concerning each university’s relationship to the wider Indigenous communities of the regions in which they sit. This includes exploration of the institutions’ relationships with local nonprofit organizations, tribal governments, and initiatives which seek to include outside Indigenous voice in campus affairs.Item Huibana : cultivating Bobonaza Quichua and forest animal relations of mutual care and utility(2021-12-03) Beveridge, James Michael; Campbell, Craig A. R., 1973-; Speed, Shannon; Strong, Pauline; Hartigan, Jr, John; Cepek, MichaelThis dissertation examines the relational philosophy of Quichua Indigenous people living along the Bobonaza river in the Ecuadorian Amazon. I argue that Bobonaza river Quichuas cultivate social relationships with nonhuman beings such as plants and animals to navigate the web of biosemiotic relations that constitute the Amazon forest. I examine Amazonian Quichua and anthropological notions of ‘self’ and kinship in more-than-human contexts. Bobonaza Quichuas understand nonhuman beings such as plants and animals to be selves imbued with intentionality, sociality, and subjectivity. They become yacharishka (familiar with or accustomed to) with nonhuman selves through specific practices such as songs, dreaming, and the ingestion of entheogens. By becoming yacharishka and come to intimately know and be aligned with nonhuman selves, Bobonaza Quichuas are able to cultivate intersubjective relationships of mutual care and utility with nonhuman selves to harness their attributes and powers. My principal intervention is to rethink the widespread Amazonian Indigenous practice of capturing and raising forest animals (huibana in Quichua). This practice has largely been theorized within the neostructuralist paradigm of predation, mastery, and ownership which frames the human-forest animal relationship as one of master/owner and pet. However, my ethnographic research shows how Bobonaza Quichua women raise huiba (forest) animals to act as sensors in locating dangers in the forest such as snakes, spiders, and ants. Bobonaza women become yacharishka with the huiba animals by being attentive to their particular calls, signals, and bodily movements. In this way, Bobonaza women are able to tap into the biosemiotic web of forest relations using the huiba animals as a sensory medium. I argue that rather than taming and ownership, the Quichua-huiba relationship is a semiotic intersubjective relationship of mutual care and utility. Furthermore, the centrality of women in navigating nonhuman relationships with huiba animals and other practices joins other scholarship in problematizing the neostructuralist theorization of women in dichotomous ways: consanguienty to men’s affinity, interiority to men’s exteriority, women’s domestic and domesticating, to men’s wild and predation. Finally, in contrast to scholars working in the vein of ontological politics and ontological turn that posit a pluriverse or multiple worlds, I argue that Bobonaza Quichua and nonhuman being relation-making is bound up in the overarching biosemiotic relational schema within all beings participate and co-become. Bobonaza Quichuas very much inhabit this relational and phenomenological world and are attuned to the political, social, and semiotic contours of the world they live in. The crucial difference is the ways that Bobonaza Quichuas are attentive to, become yacharishka with, and cultivate intersubjective relationships with the nonhuman plants and animals that constitute the world they share.Item In school but not of it : the making of Kuna-language education(2011-05) Price, Kayla Marie; Strong, Pauline Turner, 1953-; Sherzer, Joel; Keating, Elizabeth; Foley, Douglas; Woodbury, AnthonyThis research concerns a Kuna-Spanish bilingual elementary school in Panama City, founded for Kuna children by Kuna teachers. Based on ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork, this research investigates the socio-cultural context for the emergence of the school and the ways that students, teachers and parents, together with Kuna elders, navigate the path of indigenous schooling. The process of negotiating linguistic and cultural meanings in Kuna-language education includes both "traditionalized" Kuna forms of learning and informal education in and around the home. These various foundations of Kuna knowledge, from the use of Kuna oral history to eating Kuna food in the home, are incorporated into the curriculum in various ways, highlighting the potential of schooling as a place of knowledge production for indigenous peoples that is culturally inclusive. At the same time, the manner in which Kuna identity is indexed in the school is uneven. It is liberating in some moments while very restrictive in others, reflecting similar patterns, often in relation to state-sponsored notions of "multiculturalism" in the Kuna community and in the broader context of Panamanian society. In order to fully explore the complexities of the school and its workings, this research explores the Kuna experience in Panama City, where more than half of the Kuna population currently resides. This dissertation is a contribution to the fields of linguistic anthropology and the anthropology of education, analyzing the case of an urban Kuna school that employs both Western and indigenous pedagogy and content, with specific implications for studies of language socialization, bilingual education and educational politics for indigenous peoples.Item Internal and External Ethnicities: With Special Reference to Central America(1989) Adams, Richard N.Item International law and resource extraction : the reconstruction of indigenous identity in Cajamarca, Peru(2017-05-03) Egerstrom, Anne Marie; Liu, Amy H.; Brinks, DanielWhy has there been a sudden upsurge in the politicization of indigenous identities in Latin America? Drawing upon constructivist assumptions of ethnic identity, I find that ILO 169 and the rights contained in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples have been accompanied by a re-construction of indigenous identity in Cajamarca, Peru. Communities that are vulnerable to the deleterious effects of natural resource extraction and have historically identified as non-indigenous, despite having an indigenous identity in their identity repertoire, have re-constructed their indigenous identity as part of a strategy to maintain tenure over traditional lands, but only after the fact that power and rights have been awarded to these communities by international bodies of law and national legal frameworks alike. That is, bodies of law can activate an indigenous cleavage under a condition of grievance.Item Itzel Garcia Interview(2021-03-16) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Itzel Garcia, an indigenous Mexican-American who works in cultural education. Having grown up as part of a migrant family living in The Valley, Itzel speaks about how police brutality, alienation from American culture, and the legacy of colonization have all impacted her life. She shares her experience of connecting with the indigenous imagination and Mexica tradition through her work at Academia Cuauhtli, the impact that work has on her and the Latin American community in Austin, and how that work has shifted during the pandemic.Item Justice is healing : an indigenous approach to sexual trauma(2017-12) Ringland, Valerie; Busch-Armendariz, Noël Bridget; Cole, Allan; Cubbin, Catherine; Faulkner, Monica; Marder, MichaelThis dissertation brings indigenous perspectives on trauma and healing into academic literature in an effort to expand the Western scientific cultural understanding of trauma due to sexual violence, offer alternative causes and tools for healing. The term “Western” refers to a culture principally based on Judeo-Christian and scientific thinking that is predominant in the United States today, and is the culture out of which the modern field of social work was founded. Though the term “Indigenous” may refer to a cultural group whose beliefs, traditions and ways of living originated with connection to a specific place, “Indigenous” refers more generally to people with a medicine-wheel-based perspective on life, see the world as cyclical and have a conscious awareness of an inherent inter-connectedness of being (Cervantes & McNeill, 2008). Concepts such as justice and healing differ by culture, and are both topics of focus in the field of social work. In indigenous thinking, justice is synonymous with healing. Within an indigenous cosmology, this dissertation explores healing of sexual trauma through three projects: (1) a theoretical approach to healing trauma generally and sexual trauma in particular, with simple tools for social work practitioners and everyday people to use; (2) use of the indigenous healing tool empathic dialogue as qualitative research interview for people within the roles of sex offender, family member and victim; and (3) a Bayesian network analysis using indigenous theory to illuminate behaviors suggesting that adolescents are carrying trauma from childhood.Item Linguistic and Cultural Geography of Contemporary Peru(1987) Knapp, GregoryItem Migrantes nahuas celebran a Santiago Apóstol : un ejercicio de comunalidad en Nueva York(2017-08) Santopietro, Judith; Polit Dueñas, Gabriela; Salgado, César A.; Cárcamo-Huechante, LuisThis essay is an analysis of the social and cultural elements of a ceremony held by an indigenous migrant community in New York City. The ceremony under study is the annual festivity and dances in honor of Santiago Apostol by the Nahua people from Teopantlán, Puebla (Mexico). In approaching this ceremony, I use the category ‘comunalidad’ put in practice by the indigenous leader and thinker (ayuujk/mixe) Floriberto Díaz Gómez in his book Escrito. Comunalidad, energía viva del pensamiento mixe. Ayuujktsënää´yën – ayuujkwënmää´ny – ayuujk mëk´äjtën. In this research, I approach native subjects who are able to revitalize the dances and rituals to honor the patron saint, who protects the land belonging to people in Mexico. However, I argue that the revitalization of this dances and rituals is carried out to recreate and reproduce community by the subject in the new space it inhabits: the periphery of the urban spaces. Hence, the indigenous migrant people in the United States of America are reproducing their social and cultural spaces. Throughout the study, I illustrate how the religious and cultural practices become mechanisms through which these territories are constituted to exercise the "comunalidad", even if they do not possess the land in this country. In this case study, the new cultural territory is created along the districts of New York City. This space is characterized by the reproduction of rituals and ceremonies to venerate patron saints, the use of native ingredients in the foodways and the practice of traditional medicine in daily life. Moreover, the territory is constituted by private spaces and the hierarchical social organization stablished to hold ceremonies. The cultural complex of the Santiago Apostol dance also allows us to understand contemporary indigenous migration to New York City as a result of an economical displacement in the context of NAFTA.Item Militarization of daily life : negotiation of power in 1980s rural Guatemala(2017-05-05) Markarian, Vasken Gregory; Garrard, Virginia 1957-; Twinam, Ann“We did it out of fear. We cooperated because whoever didn’t cooperate would be punished. And besides that, they dug a huge ditch, there on the side of the road. We were afraid and had to do it, because where else [could we go]? And we were in their grasp, in their hands.” This quote describes the Guatemalan army forcing civilians to commit acts of violence against their neighbors. Such a practice exemplified the internal armed conflict that took place in the Guatemalan countryside during the 1980s. As a strategic response to combat against what they termed as Marxist rebel armies, the military under General Fernando Romeo Luca García in 1981 began a system of forcible recruitment of the mostly Maya male population into rural militias. Commonly referred to as civilian defense patrols or PACs (patrullas de autodefensa civil) these local paramilitary groups represented a larger process of militarization that heavily influenced local social contexts. This paper explores the dynamic local social context of the civil patrols, and militarization in Guatemala more generally from the perspective of those who underwent it. First, it reviews the historiography on the PAC in the Guatemalan countryside during its peak years of activity in the 1980s. It then offers an analysis of witness testimonies from the 1980s that speak to the forced recruitment of militias, and martial law in rural communities. In doing so, it seeks to explain how rural society negotiated the meanings, value system, and power, under a military state. The goal of the historiographical review and research is to offer a new direction in analysis that places the experiences of civilians at the forefront to highlight how they ultimately mediated and negotiated the control mechanisms of the military occupation.