Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England

Series Editors’ Introduction

BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page ix / / Beyond Conquest / Amy E. Den Ouden 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 [First Page] [-9], (1) Lines: 0 to 19 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-9], (1) Series Editors’ Introduction Beyond Conquest is the fifth volume in Fourth World Rising, a series of contemporaryethnographiesfromtheUniversityofNebraskaPress.The series focuses on contemporary issues, including class, gender, religion, and politics: in sum, it addresses social and cultural differentiation among and between Native peoples as they confront those around them and each other in struggles for better lives, better futures, and better visions of their own pasts. This focus thus represents a departure from manyofthemonographsproducedbyanthropologistsaboutNativepeoples , which often have sought to reproduce either visions of ways of life now long past or else pasts refracted through current idealization. In the process, traditional anthropology has helped enshrine a backwardlooking focus to Native culture that has, at times, been influential in the way laws are framed and even in how Native peoples come to see their own identity. Ideas, especially when enshrined in law and lent the authority of governments , have power. And the idea that Native cultures and societies are historical artifacts rather than ongoing projects has served to narrow the politics of Native identity or indigenism worldwide. One purpose of this series is to change this focus and broaden the conception of Native struggle to match its current complexity. This is especially important now, for the last two decades have provided prominent examples of Native peoples seeking to recast the public – and, ultimately, political – basis of their Native identity in ways other than the reproduction of often fanciful, even fictional, pasts. Our hope is that by offering a variety of texts focused on these and other contemporary issues, structured for classroom use and a general audience, we can help change the public perception of Native struggle – allowing people to see that Native cultures and societies are very much ongoing (and, to a surprising extent, on their own terms) and that the issues they confront carry important practical and theoretical implications for a more general understanding of cultural and political processes. ix BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page x / / Beyond Conquest / Amy E. Den Ouden Series Editors’ Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 [-10], (2) Lines: 19 to 27 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-10], (2) The primary geographical and topical emphasis of the Fourth World Rising series is the Native peoples of the Americas, but the series also includes comparative cases from Australia, Africa, Asia, the circumpolar Arctic and sub-Arctic, and the Pacific Islands. Yet beyond its unique topical and contemporary focus, four critical theoretical and political features distinguish the series as well: 1. A focus on the struggles Native peoples must fight, with the dominant society and with each other, whether they wish to or not, in order to survive as peoples, as communities, and as individuals, as well as the struggles they choose to fight. 2. A consideration of how the intensifying inequalities within and between Native communities – emerging from social, cultural, and economic differences among Native peoples – create unavoidable antagonisms , so that there cannot be any simple lines of cleavage between a dominant,oppressive,andexploitativestateontheonesideanditslongsufferingvictimsontheother .Thustheseriespaysparticularattentionto gender,identity,religion,age,andclassdivisionsamongNativepeoples, along with differences in the goals and strategies that emerge from these struggles. An emphasis on internal differences and tensions among Native peoples is not at all intended to let the dominant states and societies off the hook for their policies and practices. Rather, this perspective calls to the foreground how internal complexities and divisions among Native peoples and communities shape their struggles within and against the larger societies in which they find themselves. Indeed, it is precisely these internal differences among and between Native peoples (and how these differences unfold over time and through Native peoples’ complex relations to one another) that give Native people their own history and their own social processes that are, ultimately, partly separate from the history imposed upon them by the dominant society. 3. An emphasis on the praxis of Native struggles: what works, and why, and...