American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION For more than a century, anthropological interest in the status of aboriginal women of North America has been shaped primarily by theoretical debates concerning the complex relationships between women’s changing social position, social evolution, and economic transformation and, more recently, the penetration of colonizing state societies. Since the 1970s’ however, feminist scholars have redirected theoretical attention either to interpretations of how gender categories are conceptualized, symbolized, and privileged or to historical materialist analyses of women’s status as measured by their relative autonomy and dependence, their control over human and economic resources, and their capacity to exercise public authority. Historical materialists have concentrated on documentary research in their efforts to assess the impact of colonialism on women’s sociopolitical status. They have embarked on case studies to understand how the articulation between marginal community economies and capitalism establishes the material bases of women’s empowerment.

Declining ischemic heart disease mortality rates over the last quarter-century have been well documented in the United States. Factors such as improved recognition and treatment of hypertension, behavioral changes caused by public awareness of the health risks of smoking, and lower serum cholesterol resulting from medication and dietary changes have probably been major contributors to this decline. Little information exists, however, regarding long-term trends in ischemic heart disease mortality in southwestern American Indians and Hispanics. Previously, we reported ischemic heart disease mortality rates in American Indians and Hispanics in New Mexico from 1958-82. To further investigate trends in ischemic heart disease mortality in New Mexico, we examined mortality data for ischemic heart disease to include the years 1958-92, a thirty-five-year time span.

Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range (1927) is one of the first pieces of fiction written by a Native American woman. Although scholars have discussed Cogewea and its author, Mourning Dove, they have not commented on the fact that this novel also contains some of the first literary criticism by a Native American. I am referring especially to chapter 10, where the title character reads a novel called The Brand and angrily denounces it. As Cogewea reads the book, she becomes ”absorbed with rage” (Cogewea, 88). Her “fury” increases as she reads (Cogewea, 89-90), and, later, she throws “the hateful volume’’ to the floor (Cogewea, 90). At the very end of the chapter, she finds “solace in consigning the maligning volumn [sic] to the kitchen stove’’ (Cogewea, 96). Although Cogewea does not identify the author or the date of the novel she finds so offensive, the book can be no other than Therese Broderick‘s The Brand: A Tale of the Flathead Reservation (1909). I am not the first to identify the novel or to suggest that there was a connection between it and Cogewea? but, before now, no one has explored either that novel or that connection in any detail. After summarizing the central events in The Brand, I will first discuss the identity of the critic who denounces the novel; second, I will consider the similarities and differences between The Brand and Cogewea; third, I will uncover the principle of literary criticism implicit in Cogewea’s denunciation of The Brand; fourth, I will determine how fair that denunciation is; and, fifth, I will suggest that Mourning Dove has Cogewea misread The Brand in order to characterize her and to warn other Indians about the dangers of refusing to take to heart the implications of stories. If I am right, then Cogewea is a far subtler book than has previously been assumed.

INTRODUCTION This paper summarizes the descriptions of "grandmotherhood" provided to me by approximately 25 percent of women of various ages at San Juan Pueblo. It also includes observations I have recorded concerning use of kinship terms and other kin-based behaviors. In my attempts to understand the range of grandmotherhood, I use the concept of grandmother to denote both an achieved and an ascribed status: achieved by living long enough to raise a child healthy enough to have a child; ascribed by custom when a child of a child is born. One cannot change these biological facts. One can choose whether or not to engage in the behaviors expected of persons in this life stage. This paper is based on analysis of oral history materials I have collected; my reading of Doris Duke archival materials; formal interviews with a range of tribal members; and informal discussions and participant observations of more than three hundred members of a Tewa extended family with whom I have worked annually for various lengths of time over the course of twenty-three years. The full extended family represents approximately one-half of the Tewa who live at San Juan Pueblo.

The trickster myths in Gerald Vizenor’s Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories come nearly verbatim from a series of tales in The Progress, the first newspaper published on an Indian reservation in Minnesota. Appearing in the late 1880s, the series was originally edited by Theodore Hudon Beaulieu (Summer, 15-16). From the standpoint of the contemporary literary scholar, the series might simply seem an historical collection of tribal lore and a useful collection from which to develop a source study for Vizenor’s works, but for Beaulieu’s Anishinaabe (Ojibwe/Chippewa) audience or Vizenor’s interested non-Anishinaabe academic audience engaged in the study of the dynamic function of open-ended trickster discourse, these narratives offer insight concerning the function and enduring value of native texts. A brief review of the publication history of the tales offers Vizenor’s contemporary audience insight into their original intention. Twenty years before Beaulieu’s publication of the narrative series in The Progress, Anishinaabe families had begun to experience another in a series of removals, this time from their homes in different parts of the state to the newly organized White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. One hundred years of the gradual stripping away of Anishinaabe land and natural resources, as well as the threat of further erosion of tribal sovereignty, compelled Gus and Theodore Beaulieu to establish The Progress.

History is not simply something that happens to people, but something they make-within, of course, the very powerful constraints of the system within which they are operating. -Sherry B. Ortner For more than three hundred years, historians have pointed to the trial of three Indians for the alleged murder of the Indian John Sassamon as the proximate cause of King Philip’s War. These scholars have posited that the execution of the Indians for Sassamon’s murder triggered a total war among the region’s inhabitants in June 1675. At the same time, however, many researchers have demonstrated that Indians usually received unfair treatment in the colonial courts; if that is true, why did the Sassamon trial, in particular, after years of legal inequality, signify such a threat that Indians throughout the Northeast put their communities at risk in a full-scale war effort? To answer this question, one must understand exactly what the trial symbolized to various Indians, especially to Philip and the Pokanoket (Wampanoag). And to interpret the symbolism of the trial, one must comprehend the situation that various Indians believed they had created for themselves and the Northeast’s English inhabitants.

This article explores possible historical and cultural reasons for the high prevalence of contemporary tobacco use among North American Indian populations. A literature review of American Indian tobacco use in early precontact and colonial times reveals that tobacco was used extensively for ceremonial, spiritual, social, political, and medicinal purposes. Centuries of aboriginal sacred use of tobacco, combined with increasing commercial use since the fur trade, may have provided a residual base of susceptibility for later secular use-an old form with a new meaning. Because of its high prevalence rate among most American Indian social groupings, tobacco is very probably the greatest threat to the health of American Indians today. Its addictive qualities place it on a par with alcohol as a source of physical and psychological dependency, a fact not always recognized in American Indian social contexts.