American Indian Women of Proud Nations
Essays on History, Language, Healing, and Education - Second Edition
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Titel
- Copyright
- Autorenangaben
- Über das Buch
- Zitierfähigkeit des eBooks
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Dedication
- Foreword as a Song: We’re Still Here
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I: Women’s History and Community Recovery
- Future of Kituwah (Cherokee) Matrilinearity
- Cherokee Women Heal Boarding School Trauma
- Journey Towards Ethnic Renewal
- Community Healing Responses to MMIP
- Lifting Community Voices to Address NA MMIW
- Blending Traditional and Western Medicine
- Part II: Education, Traditional Knowledge, and Parenting
- Traditional Healing Practices Among Lumbees
- Breathing New Life into the Yuchi Language
- Decolonizing the University Curriculum
- Indigenous Parenting for Adolescent Well-being
- Indigenous Women’s Voices in Higher Education
- Contributors
- Index
Dedication
The second edition of American Indian Women of Proud Nations. Essays on History, Language, and Education was created in a spirit of stewardship and gratitude to Southeastern American Indian women, who have encouraged others to reach their greatest potential. It was in the same spirit that the authors contributed their works. The authors, and indeed, all the women who have worked together to create and sustain the American Indian Women of Proud Nations (AIWPN) organization, owe a special thanks to Rosa Winfree, who has encouraged, inspired, and guided us to embark on and embrace this work. It is to Ms. Rosa that this volume is dedicated.
Together, we continue to strive preserving the history, understanding, and culture of American Indian and Indigenous women and girls, their families, and their communities.
Foreword as a Song: We’re Still Here
Nadine F. Patrick
Editors’ Note. According to Kay Freeman, ‘We’re Still Here’ was written and composed as a tribute to the eight state recognized tribes of North Carolina. The composer, a member of the Waccamaw Siouan tribe (People of the Falling Star), dedicated this song to her mother, Shirley Freeman. The eight state- recognized tribes are Coharie, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Haliwa- Saponi, Lumbee, Meherrin, Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, Sappony, and Waccamaw-Siouan. In one of the YouTube renderings of the beloved song/poem, her niece, Alina Jacobs, Miss NC Native American Youth Organization, is recorded in a performance interpreting its meaning at a conference of the American Indian Women of Proud Nations organization in September 2012.1
We’re Still Here
Whenever the Great Creator gave life to Indian people,
He gave us purpose and He gave us promise.
His work has never stopped. Our work must never stop.
He never gave up. We must never give up.
Our Creator, our God, our Father, is still here.
And we as a Native people, we are still here.
It’s been a struggle; it’s been a fight. Trying to prove who’s wrong and who’s right.
Through all of the pain, the bloodshed and tears
you can be certain, We’re Still Here.
We’re Still Here.
The battle’s not over. The struggle goes on
To prove to the world, we are not gone.
Recognition may fail, it may never be clear, But you can be certain, We’re Still Here.
Though our spirit’s been broken, we are alive.
We are survivors. We’re more than conquerors.
We are still fighting for our voice to be heard.
We walk as the Waccamaw Siouan, we walk as the Occaneechi,
we walk as the Haliwa-Saponi, we walk as Coharie,
we walk as the Lumbee, we walk as Sappony,
we walk as Meherrin, we walk as the Cherokee.
We’re a Native people. We now stand as one. We’re a Native people. We’re standing tall.
We’ve still got pride, still got integrity. One fact remains, We’re Still Here.We’re Still Here.
We’re Still Here.
1 Kay Freeman, Note for “We’re Still Here” video recording, American Indian Women of Proud Nations Conference, 2012. Accessed January 31, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D8_tVgx7IA.
Acknowledgments
The editors thank the core committee and various conference planning committee members who contributed to the American Indian of Proud Nations organization. Without their dedication and efforts, the idea and content of this book would not have come into being.
We are grateful for the authors who agreed to update the chapters that were published in the first edition. We also thank the authors who shared their previously unpublished work with us, and all those who have contributed stories and insights that serve as the foundation for new chapters. Many times, American Indians have been the subject of poorly conducted research, yet in their quest to be understood and to contribute to the greater conversation of humanity, they continue to work with non-Native researchers. These heroic efforts deserve our acknowledgment. We gratefully acknowledge financial support for the manuscript preparation from the Anna R. Belk Endowed Professorship for Rural and Minority Health. Without the emotional and practical support and encouragement from our families, friends, and colleagues, this book would not have been completed. Thank you! We offer our deep thanks to our copy editor Zac Zuber-Zander and our editors at Peter Lang, especially Anthony Mason, for their enthusiastic support of our collaborative project.
Introduction
Ulrike Wiethaus
The second edition of American Indian Women of Proud Nations. Essays on History, Language, Healing, and Education remains true to the first edition’s thematic scope and its network of Southeastern Native communities, their knowledge keepers, and scholars. It has widened its focus, however, to include boarding schools and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women/Persons initiative. As we noted in the first edition, the contributors are in one way or another linked to a national annual conference held in North Carolina by the non-profit organization of the same name, American Indian Women of Proud Nations (AIWPN). Designed by its founding women elders with a strong commitment to the improvement of Native women’s lives and their communities, the mission of the conference states that “The American Indian Women of Proud Nations support American Indian women’s efforts to build healthier lives for themselves, their families, and their communities in a spirit of holistic inquiry and empowerment.”1
As co-editors and AIWPN conference archivists, we gathered not only scholarly research from conference presenters, but also a rich collection of women’s oral histories, words of hard-gained wisdom by elders, and poetry. As Lumbee scholars Ryan E. Emanuel and Karen Dial Bird have recently pointed out, “Telling one’s own story is a way of asserting identity. It is simultaneously a fundamental responsibility and an inherent gift for each human being—and is often one of the first casualties of colonialism and oppression.”2 To Indigenous peoples, orally transmitted knowledge is therefore not only culturally congruent Native science and scholarship, but because of its ongoing marginalization by settler society epistemologies, all the more precious and vulnerable. We published the AIWPN oral histories companion volume to the first and now second edition under the title Upon Her Shoulders. Southeastern Native Women Share their Stories of Justice, Spirit, and Community in 2022.3 Our editorial projects share the truth that Native societies “have raised girls from an early age to be independent and competent leaders, to access traditional Native spirituality despite religious oppression, and to fight for justice for themselves and other Native people across the nation in the face of legal and societal oppression.”4
While working on Upon Her Shoulders, we were curious to find out where the AIWPN scholars had taken their work after the first edition. We invited them to contribute to a second edition, an idea that Peter Lang Publishing endorsed generously and without hesitation. We asked, what has changed, and what has remained the same? Some of the first edition’s scholars had moved on to other projects; their first edition chapters still stand strong in their own right. Some scholars updated their original chapters to include more recent scholarship in their respective fields; others invited different collaborators and pursued new themes; and finally, after some additional queries across our AIWPN network, some authors or conference presenters not included in the first volume generously shared their work.
As we reflected on the new submissions, several themes emerged that, while already present in the first edition, seemed to us to have become more nuanced and urgent. We summarized these themes under the rubrics of kinship, language, and land.
Kinship
Southeastern Native women’s kinship was addressed in our first edition in the poignant essay by Lumbee historian Malinda Maynor Lowery. It mapped the biographies of three historical Lumbee female ancestors as exemplars of Native women’s arts of survivance.5 In the second edition, Lisa J. Lefler embedded the lives of individual women in the Indigenous worldview of Southeastern Native matrilineal systems beyond Western anthropological categories. Intergenerational relationships, especially between grandmothers, mothers, and their children and grandchildren, have become more visible across several other essays as Native women’s source of strength and knowledge transmission. As much as these chapters celebrate the resilience of intergenerational ties, the urgency of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s Movement (#MMIW) and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons’ Movement (#MMIP) has attracted the attention and need for new research out of trauma, anger, and grief, all expressions of the tears in intergenerational women’s love and care for each other and their families.6
The celebration of women’s life cycle from childhood to elderhood has been a part of AIWPN’s choice of scholarly keynotes and community workshops, talking circles, and honoring ceremonies. AIWPN has also created space for grief and a call for justice when intergenerational ties are frayed by violence and historical trauma. AIWPN stands with #MMIW, #MMIP, and with all families who demand/wait for/take action to bring about justice for their loved ones.
Language
New work on language revitalization suggests a novel stage of uplifting language recovery and its shadow of grief over language loss. While acknowledging the loss of elders who were fluent speakers, Native educators increasingly document and analyze how young children raised as first-language speakers learn to think and feel in their tribal language. Acknowledging the pain of language loss, the second edition also includes a biographical chapter that details language loss and its consequences for the three generations of grandmother, mother, and daughter, as implemented by the boarding school system. Read together, the chapters offer a deeper view of a significant dimension of American Indian women’s history.
Land
New connections emerged between chapters that offered a fresh focus on women’s educational initiatives, healing, and homelands. In the first edition, educational scholar Olivia Oxendine’s analysis of Lumbee teachers’ tenacious support for their young and often impoverished Native students in a segregated school system revealed the importance of pedagogical dispositions.7 New work in the second edition includes a historical overview of the reclamation of Indigenous educational self-determination on Indigenous homelands, thus underscoring the link between land, identity, and knowledge creation. A new chapter on healing traditions reveals the medical importance of knowing the land, its sacred sites such as graveyards, and its plant and animal life for making medicinal teas and salves.
To accurately communicate the non-negotiable value of land, language, and kinship for Native women, Indigenous methodologies are needed in what one of the editors calls a “blending of horizons” with Western scholarly traditions in the sciences and humanities. The first edition acknowledged this need in discussions of Indigenous hermeneutics and first-person narratives on the theoretical level.8 The second edition went further by including more methodologically diverse chapters that put the theory into practice. This editorial decision recognizes that since the publication of the first edition, Indigenous research methodologies have become more widely practiced and accepted. The growing body of Indigenous-authored scholarship endeavors to bridge knowledge systems that Indigenous peoples have built, taught, and applied since time immemorial with Western research methods and theories. For the first volume, we focused on our scholarly keynotes, which utilized a different type of discourse than the conferences’ honoring ceremonies and talking circles. Our second book, Upon Her Shoulders, gathered the multigenerational voices of AIWPN community members. Its format enabled women to tell their own stories and to engage with the generation of elders and children. This second edition blends both formats and epistemologies. It invites a rewriting of the Western model of a disembodied scholar as a storied person embedded in distinct kinship, land, and language networks.
These differently storied identities redefine the concept of “woman” also in the sense of gender as a choice of a social role rather than being determined by biology. Unlike homophobic Western cultures shaped by Christian heteronormativity, traditional Native cultures often offered children or adolescents the choice to live as what is called today “Two Spirit” persons, that is, choosing a social gender role that expressed their sense of gender identity most accurately. For example, many Lumbee elders remember a biologically male tribal member who was fully accepted by the community in his choice of wearing women’s clothing and making women’s dresses for a living.
Details
- Pages
- XVI, 236
- Publication Year
- 2024
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781433196201
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781433196218
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781433195914
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781433196195
- DOI
- 10.3726/b21654
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2024 (February)
- Keywords
- American Indian Women in the Southeast American Indian Women and Boarding School Trauma Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Missing and Murdered Indigenous People American Indian Women’s History in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Indian Women Autobiography American Indian Women and Traditional Knowledge Transmission American Indian Women and Parenting American Indian Women Activism American Indian Women and Higher Education American Indian Women of Proud Nations Cherry M. Beasley Mary Ann Jacobs Ulrike Wiethaus
- Published
- New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2024. XVI, 236 pp., 1 b/w ill.