Indian Country, God's Country

Indian Country, God's Country PDF Author: Philip Burnham
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
The mythology of "gifted land" is strong in the Park Service, but some of our greatest parks were "gifted" by people who had little if any choice in the matter. Places like the Grand Canyon's south rim and Glacier had to be bought, finagled, borrowed -- or taken by force -- when Indian occupants and owners resisted the call to contribute to the public welfare. The story of national parks and Indians is, depending on perspective, a costly triumph of the public interest, or a bitter betrayal of America's native people.In Indian Country, God's Country historian Philip Burnham traces the complex relationship between Native Americans and the national parks, relating how Indians were removed, relocated, or otherwise kept at arm's length from lands that became some of our nation's most hallowed ground. Burnham focuses on five parks: Glacier, the Badlands, Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon, and Death Valley. Based on archival research and extensive personal visits and interviews, he examines the beginnings of the national park system and early years of the National Park Service, along with later Congressional initiatives to mainstream American Indians and expand and refurbish the parks. The final chapters visit the parks as they are today, presenting the thoughts and insights of superintendents and rangers, tribal officials and archaeologists, ranchers, community leaders, curators, and elders. Burnham reports on hard-won compromises that have given tribes more autonomy and greater cultural recognition in recent years, while highlighting stubborn conflicts that continue to mark relations between tribes and the parks.Indian Country, God's Country offers a compelling -- and until now untold -- story that illustrates the changing role of the national parks in American society, the deep ties of Native Americans to the land, and the complicated mix of commerce, tourism, and environmental preservation that characterize the parks system. Anyone interested in Native American culture and history, the history of the American West, the national park system, or environmental history will find it a fascinating and engaging work.

The Gods of Indian Country

The Gods of Indian Country PDF Author: Jennifer Graber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019027963X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
During the nineteenth century, white Americans sought the cultural transformation and physical displacement of Native people. Though this process was certainly a clash of rival economic systems and racial ideologies, it was also a profound spiritual struggle. The fight over Indian Country sparked religious crises among both Natives and Americans. In The Gods of Indian Country, Jennifer Graber tells the story of the Kiowa Indians during Anglo-Americans' hundred-year effort to seize their homeland. Like Native people across the American West, Kiowas had known struggle and dislocation before. But the forces bearing down on them-soldiers, missionaries, and government officials-were unrelenting. With pressure mounting, Kiowas adapted their ritual practices in the hope that they could use sacred power to save their lands and community. Against the Kiowas stood Protestant and Catholic leaders, missionaries, and reformers who hoped to remake Indian Country. These activists saw themselves as the Indians' friends, teachers, and protectors. They also asserted the primacy of white Christian civilization and the need to transform the spiritual and material lives of Native people. When Kiowas and other Native people resisted their designs, these Christians supported policies that broke treaties and appropriated Indian lands. They argued that the gifts bestowed by Christianity and civilization outweighed the pains that accompanied the denial of freedoms, the destruction of communities, and the theft of resources. In order to secure Indian Country and control indigenous populations, Christian activists sanctified the economic and racial hierarchies of their day. The Gods of Indian Country tells a complex, fascinating-and ultimately heartbreaking-tale of the struggle for the American West.

God's Country

God's Country PDF Author: Percival Everett
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807016292
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
The unlikely narrator through this tale of misadventures is one Curt Marder: gambler, drinker, cheat, and would-be womanizer. It's 1871, and he's lost his farm, his wife, and his dog to a band of marauding hooligans. With nothing to live on but a desire to recover what is rightfully his, Marder is forced to enlist the help of the best tracker in the West: a black man named Bubba.

The Gods of Indian Country

The Gods of Indian Country PDF Author: Jennifer Graber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190279613
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
During the nineteenth century, Anglo-Americans inflicted cultural and economic devastation on Native people. The fight over Indian Country sparked spiritual crises for both Natives and Settlers. In the end, the experience of intercultural encounter and conflict over land produced religious transformations on both sides.

Walk Softly, this is God's Country

Walk Softly, this is God's Country PDF Author: Elinor Roberts Markley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description


American Indians and National Parks

American Indians and National Parks PDF Author: Robert H. Keller
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816520145
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Book Description
Many national parks and monuments tell unique stories of the struggle between the rights of native peoples and the wants of the dominant society. These stories involve our greatest parks—Yosemite, Yellowstone, Mesa Verde, Glacier, the Grand Canyon, Olympic, Everglades—as well as less celebrated parks elsewhere. In American Indians and National Parks, authors Robert Keller and Michael Turek relate these untold tales of conflict and collaboration. American Indians and National Parks details specific relationships between native peoples and national parks, including land claims, hunting rights, craft sales, cultural interpretation, sacred sites, disposition of cultural artifacts, entrance fees, dams, tourism promotion, water rights, and assistance to tribal parks. Beginning with a historical account of Yosemite and Yellowstone, American Indians and National Parks reveals how the creation of the two oldest parks affected native peoples and set a pattern for the century to follow. Keller and Turek examine the evolution of federal policies toward land preservation and explore provocative issues surrounding park/Indian relations. When has the National Park Service changed its policies and attitudes toward Indian tribes, and why? How have environmental organizations reacted when native demands, such as those of the Havasupai over land claims in the Grand Canyon, seem to threaten a national park? How has the Park Service dealt with native claims to hunting and fishing rights in Glacier, Olympic, and the Everglades? While investigating such questions, the authors traveled extensively in national parks and conducted over 200 interviews with Native Americans, environmentalists, park rangers, and politicians. They meticulously researched materials in archives and libraries, assembling a rich collection of case studies ranging from the 19th century to the present. In American Indians and National Parks, Keller and Turek tackle a significant and complicated subject for the first time, presenting a balanced and detailed account of the Native-American/national-park drama. This book will prove to be an invaluable resource for policymakers, conservationists, historians, park visitors, and others who are concerned about preserving both cultural and natural resources.

God is Red

God is Red PDF Author: Vine Deloria
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
ISBN: 9781555914981
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Book Description
The seminal work on Native religious views, asking questions about our species and our ultimate fate.

God Gave Us this Country

God Gave Us this Country PDF Author: Bil Gilbert
Publisher: Atheneum Books
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Book Description
In the forefront of this account is Tekamthi (often remembered as Tecumseh), the brilliant Shawnee warrior, orator, and political strategist, long renowned as the most astute and able of the red leaders. In the early 1800s be became convinced that his people could defend themselves against the United States only by forming a single racial federation. From a base at Tippecanoe in Indiana, he traveled between the Great Lakes and Gulf Coast, recruiting supporters. Though there were fewer than 100,000 free reds in these territories versus the 7 million whites of the United States, the westward advance of Manifest Destiny was slowed, in large part, by the formidable reputation and charismatic influence of Tekamthi.

God and My Country

God and My Country PDF Author: MacKinlay Kantor
Publisher: Speaking Volumes
ISBN: 1628156228
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Book Description
MACKINLAY KANTOR Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Andersonville GOD AND MY COUNTRY A Novel By MacKinlay Kantor BASIS FOR THE MOVIE FOLLOW ME, BOYS MacKinlay Kantor, the master of the warm and human story, the writer who can make us believe the good in the worst of us, has woven a compelling, appealing novel about the life of a simple American man who held in his care the destinies of hundreds of boys. Here for the first time a major writer portrays the Scoutmaster in a small town in a role as vital as the greatest of schoolmasters, doctors, priests, or ministers. With rare insight and sym­pathy, MacKinlay Kantor has created the memorable Lem Siddons, who gave forty years of his wisdom, the fund of his laughter, the knowledgeable touch, the sweetness and love that were his, to generations of Boy Scouts. Not every boy who passed khaki-clothed along his life won the world's respect or the Scout­master's pride. There were some misfits, fallers-by-the-wayside . . . sure. But Lem Siddons knew his reward every waking moment of his life and in his dreams as well. His story is one you will remember as that of the closest of your friends: his love for the delicate and freckled Vida that grew with a lifetime, his son Downey who wanted to crowd the years. All the good Kantor writing is here, the lucid and homespun prose that makes tears well in your eyes even as a song rises in your heart. MacKinlay Kantor has set the scene for God and My Country in a small town very much like Webster City, Iowa, where he was born, and has dedicated the book to his Scoutmaster of those days. It is a perfect example of MacKinlay Kantor's special genius for capturing the full flavor of a small American town, and of its people. "There's a Mr. Chips' quality to this deceptively simple story. MacKinlay Kantor has told quietly, in realistic terms, the story of one man whose in­fluence permeate a whole Iowa town and rural area. No drum heating for the American vision here, but true democracy emerges in boys at every social and human level. A microcosm of America that strengthens one's faith."—Virginia Kirkus "God and My Country is a song from the heart of America which I would love to sing."—Burl Ives

River of Gods

River of Gods PDF Author: Ian McDonald
Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
ISBN: 1625673043
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 679

Book Description
A superpower of two billion people, a dozen new nations from Kerela to the Himalayas, artificial intelligences, climate-change induced drought, water wars, strange new genders, genetically improved children that age at half the rate of baseline humanity, and a population where males outnumber females four to one. This is India in 2047, one hundred years after its birth. In the new nation of Bharat, in the face of the failure of the monsoon, nine lives are swept together — a gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set designer, a journalist, a scientist, and a dropout — to decide the future of Mother India. River of Gods teems with the life of a country choked with peoples and cultures — one and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. A war is fought, a love is betrayed, a mystery from a different world decoded, as the great river Ganges flows on. Praise for River of Gods: “[A] bold, brave look at India on the eve of its centennial, 41 years from now...McDonald takes his readers from India's darkest depths to its most opulent heights, from rioting mobs and the devastated poor to high-level politicians and lavish parties. He handles his complex plot with flair and confidence and deftly shows how technological advances and social changes have subtly changed lives. RIVER OF GODS is a major achievement from a writer who is becoming one of the best sf novelists of our time.” —Washington Post “[P]erhaps his most accomplished novel to date... reminiscent of William Gibson in full-throttle cultural-immersion mode, packed with technical jargon, religious and sociological observation and allusions to art both high and low... RIVER OF GODS amply rewards careful consideration and more than delivers its share of straight-ahead entertainment. Already a multiple-award nominee following its British publication, McDonald's latest ranks as one of the best science fiction novels published in the United States this year.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A staggering achievement, brilliantly imagined and endlessly surprising ... A brave, brilliant and wonderful novel.” —Christopher Priest, The Guardian