A wonderful forward written by Ada Deer,
(First woman to chair the
Menominee Nation in Wisconsin and the first Native American woman to run
for congress and win) gives a glimpse of the Native perspective in today’s
society. Bonvillain and McKee
give a very genuine researched effort to make this particular revised
seven book series, on the larger tribes of the North American continent,
one of the best available. (I
contacted the three tribes Teton Sioux, Choctaw, and the Mohawk to get
what they thought of the books. The general consensus is:
1) Each of our
Resources libraries has a copy of this particular series.
2) We often
recommend the books to young researchers.
Because:
a) It has less errors than most of the others that have been published.
b) It doesn’t say that the Indians came across the Bering Strait,
which most Natives find to negate their beliefs and oral histories.
c) The Mohawk book at least mentions the mourning ceremony but leaves
part of the story out that before Handsome Lake the ceremony was a year
long not ten days.
3) That the
books are written from an outside perspective and written by
anthropologists.
a) This leads to miss interpretations of things that are important to
the Native people. For
example: If a Mohawk person
would have written about Joseph Bryant there would have been more
attention paid to the actions of Joseph Bryant, a man who almost made a
political entity (the Iroquois Confederacy) collapse and then sold off
most of their land. The fact
that the men in the Mohawk tribes were not in charge of the land and the
women were would have been something very important to include.
b) Leads to important dates from the dominate society being incorporated
into the Native American Time lines. Example: “1700
BC – 1200BC Ancestors of the Mohawks and other Iroquoian peoples migrate
from the west and settled in the northeastern United States.” I think that our oral histories/stories about how we were
created would take precedent over migration.
1653 “Mohawks sign treaty of peace and friendship with the
French.” Events leading up
to the treaty would be just as important to mention. Why
they would tribes sign agreements took away their freedoms, land and ways
of life?
The
series is written in a very Euro-anthropological linear style (written
in a very scientific way. It
seems as if the authors researched the tribes through documents written by
both the United States Government agents or other
Anthropologists/ethnographers, but didn’t talk to tribal people
/historians to get the Native Point of View.
This would mean that the reader is getting a very Euro-American
ethnocentric view of Native history and people that survived genocide.) Readers
can glean what life was and is for Native peoples of North America from a
short section on prehistoric nomadic peoples living in 1700 B.C., to the
peoples fight for sovereignty and living improvements in the twenty-first
century. Colored photos in
the center of the book show the detailed crafts/handiwork of tribal
members, while black and white photos show the people.
The book offers: a brief synopsis of the tribe in “at a Glance”
section, a list of important European dates in the Chronology, a two and a
half page glossary, more book and website information in the bibliography,
a fairly lengthy index, and a brief biography on the contributors.
Marlette
Grant-Jackson – ITEPP-CRC
More Resources
