Assimilation and American Indians

After the passage of the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887, the Southern Ute Agency was the scene of an intense federal effort to assimilate the Ute Indians. The Southern Utes were to break up their common land holdings and transform themselves into middle-class patriarchal farm and pastoral families. In this assimilationist scheme women were to surrender the greater autonomy they enjoyed in traditional Ute society and to become house-bound homemakers, the "civilizers" of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. This history of Southern Ute women shows that they accommodated Anglo ways that benefited them but refused to give up indigenous culture and ways that gave their lives meaning and bolstered personal autonomy. In spite of federal policies that stripped women of many legal rights, Southern Ute women demanded participation in political, economic, and legal decisions that affected their lives and insisted on retaining control over their marital and sexual behavior.

This collection celebrates the resurgence of Native Americans within the cultural landscape of the United States. During the past quarter-century, the Native American population in the United States has seen an astonishing demographic growth reaching beyond all biological probability as increasing numbers of Americans desire to admit or to claim Native American ancestry. This volume illustrates a unique moment in history as Old World immigrants seek to realign themselves with self-assertive New Worlders.

The encounter of natives and colonists in New England is a rich source of folklore and scholarship. The story, which usually ends with the defeat of Metacom (King Philip) in 1676, tells of how the natives were overwhelmed by the colonists. That picture, though rich and deeply tragic, is misleading. Disease, economic and ecological intrusion, and political and military pressures did alter native life. Some groups were largely destroyed or driven out by the English. But many others persisted in the region, as villages or as networks of families and individuals on the margins of colonial society. Their history offers a new and enlightening view of eighteenth-century New England. Behind the Frontier tells the story of the Indians in Massachusetts as English settlements moved past them between 1675 and 1775, from King Philip's War to the Battle of Bunker Hill. Daniel R. Mandell explores how local needs and regional conditions shaped an Indian ethnic group that transcended race, tribe, village, and clan, with a culture that incorporated new ways while maintaining a core of "Indian" customs. He examines the development of Native American communities in eastern Massachusetts, many of which survive today, and observes emerging patterns of adaptation and resistance that were played out in different settings as the American nation grew westward in the nineteenth century.

The first full ethnohistory of American Indian responses to, & participation in, World War II; beginning with the drift toward war in the 1930s, including their reactions to propaganda campaigns directed at them by Nazi sympathizers.

Self-determination, a crucial concept in American Indian social and educational policy and the force behind Indian policy programs, is assessed here and found wanting. The volume contends that many aspects of this policy impulse are contradictory. Senese, looking at an area largely neglected by scholars of American educational policy, explores the discrepancy between the rhetoric of self-determination and its reality in Native American social settings. This study is rigorous in its analysis of the development, implementation, and language of this policy and unique in its critical perspective.