Native American Studies: Current Issues

"The Routledge International Handbook on Decolonizing Justice" focuses on the growing worldwide movement aimed at decolonizing state policies and practices, and various disciplinary knowledges including criminology, social work and law. The collection of original chapters brings together cutting-edge, politically engaged work from a diverse group of writers who take as a starting point an analysis founded in a decolonizing, decolonial and/or Indigenous standpoint. Centering the perspectives of Black, First Nations and other racialized and minoritized peoples, the book makes an internationally significant contribution to the literature. The chapters include analyses of specific decolonization policies and interventions instigated by communities to enhance jurisdictional self-determination; theoretical approaches to decolonization; the importance of research and research ethics as a key foundation of the decolonization process; crucial contemporary issues including deaths in custody, state crime, reparations, and transitional justice; and critical analysis of key institutions of control, including police, courts, corrections, child protection systems and other forms of carcerality.

From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community's protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies at the center of our social movements, Indigenous Resurgence positions environmental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts, exploring the troubling relationship between colonial and environmental violence and reframing climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens.

Native Americans are disproportionately represented as offenders in the U.S. criminal justice system. Routledge Handbook on Native American Justice Issues is an authoritative volume that provides an overview of the state of American Indigenous populations and their contact with justice concerns and the criminal justice system. The volume covers the history and origins of Indian Country in America; continuing controversies regarding treaties; unique issues surrounding tribal law enforcement; the operation of tribal courts and corrections, including the influence of Indigenous restorative justice practices; the impact of native religions and customs; youth justice issues, including educational practices and gaps; women's justice issues; and special circumstances surrounding healthcare for Indians, including the role substance abuse plays in contributing to criminal justice problems.

"Crime and Social Justice in Indian Country" calls to attention the need for culturally appropriate research protocols and critical discussions of social and criminal justice in Indian Country. The contributors come from the growing wave of Native American as well as non-Indigenous scholars who employ these methods. They reflect on issues in three key areas: crime, social justice, and community responses to crime and justice issues. Topics include stalking, involuntary sterilization of Indigenous women, border-town violence, Indian gaming, child welfare, and juvenile justice. These issues are all rooted in colonization; however, the contributors demonstrate how Indigenous communities are finding their own solutions for social justice, sovereignty, and self-determination.

In October 2004 Amnesty International released a report titled Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to the Discrimination and Violence against Indigenous Women in Canada, in response to the appalling number of Indigenous women who are victims of racialized and sexualized violence. This report noted over 500 missing or murdered Indigenous women. Tragically, since this initial report the numbers have risen. Noting that Indigenous women are eight times more likely to die as a result of violence, the most recent RCMP report documented 1181 missing or murdered Aboriginal women and girls (2013), with more distressing cases being reported every month. After conducting an extensive investigation here in Canada, in March of 2015 the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women issued their report condemning Canada for the ongoing failure to protect Indigenous women and girls calling it a "grave human rights violation" (UNCEDAW). Over 40 separate reports have outlined the increase in racialized and sexualized violence against Indigenous women, yet the recommendations they contain are ignored. The failure of the federal government to respond to this issue has resulted in widespread pressure from human rights groups, grassroots movements, and community leaders. This collection supports the call for prompt response and action and urges Justin Trudeau to hold his promise to immediately launch a public inquiry. This collection brings together the voices of Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics, frontline workers and activists who weave together academic and personal narratives, spoken word and poetry in the spirit of demanding immediate action. Our intent is to honour our missing sisters and their families, to honour their lives and their stories.

Divided into four major sections, each containing an introduction, this book places the historical foundations of Native American social work in context in order to fully provide the reader wit a comprehensive survey on various aspects of working with Native American families; community revitalization and decolonization.

In recent decades U.S. colleges and universities have been prone to changing athletic conference affiliations, seeking increased public prestige, building fan bases, and, of course, growing revenues. Such moves are driven by a very realistic set of calculations: in 2010 the collective revenue of the fifteen highest-grossing teams in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) topped one billion dollars, a hefty figure that does not even take into account the revenue generated by the sales of university-related apparel and athletic gear. Expressions of team allegiance, particularly the display of sports mascots, are a visual expression of this American obsession with collegiate sport. In American Spectacle, historian Jennifer Guiliano investigates the role of sports mascots in the big business of American college football in order to connect mascotry to twentieth-century expressions of community identity, individual belonging, stereotyped imagery, and cultural hegemony. To do so, she historicizes the creation and spread of mascots and university identities as something bound up in the spectacle of halftime performance, the growth of collegiate competition, the anxiety of middle-class masculinity, and the commercialization of athletics in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

This is an edited volume that provides definitions, meanings, and significances of select key concepts often used in Native studies. These concepts include: sovereignty, land, Indigeneity, nations, blood, tradition, colonialism, and Indigenous epistemologies/knowledges. The manuscript is divided into eight sections, and each section includes three or four essays about one of the concepts. The essays provide a historical, social, and political context for the concepts and indicate how they have been drawn upon by scholars of Native studies.

Dispossession and removal are major subjects in understanding the relationship of American Indians to their ancestral lands. This book is the first treatment of these complex topics to focus on women writers. The author's emphasis on environmental issues makes her book as important to ecocritics as to students of literary criticism, women's studies, and Native American studies.

Explores how American Indian businesses and organizations are taking on images that were designed to oppress them. How and why do American Indians appropriate images of Indians for their own purposes? How do these representatives promote and sometimes challenge sovereignty for Indigenous people locally and nationally? American Indians have recently taken on a new relationship with the hegemonic culture designed to oppress them. Rather than protesting it, they are earmarking images from it and using them for their own ends. This provocative book adds an interesting twist and nuance to our understanding of the five-hundred year interchange between American Indians and others. A host of examples of how American Indians use the so-called "White Man's Indian" reveal the key images and issues selected most frequently by the representatives of Native organizations or Native-owned businesses in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to appropriate Indianness.

In this revolutionary text, prominent Native American studies scholar and activist Andrea Smith reveals the connections between different forms of violence—perpetrated by the state and by society at large—and documents their impact on Native women. Beginning with the impact of the abuses inflicted on Native American children at state-sanctioned boarding schools from the 1880s to the 1980s, Smith adroitly expands our conception of violence to include the widespread appropriation of Indian cultural practices by whites and other non-Natives; environmental racism; and population control. Smith deftly connects these and other examples of historical and contemporary colonialism to the high rates of violence against Native American women—the most likely to suffer from poverty-related illness and to survive rape and partner abuse. Smith also outlines radical and innovative strategies for eliminating gendered violence.

This book examines social implications of research on the effects of prenatal alcohol and drug abuse. It also describes current research within African-American and Native American communities.

The history of American "Indian," both past and present, has been encompassed by myth and caricature. Concentrating on the Native American nations of the "lower forty-eighty," "Native American Voices" surveys tribal groups, their life before the European conquerors arrived, religious encounters, current beliefs, and history of pain. Written to inform and challenge the average reader as well as the professional, this account goes beyond history to assess continuing justice issues and immense problems that face the Native American community today. The book presents research data and the need for a response. Say the authors: "Only a change of opinion and a clear insight by the majority of this land will end the debilitating prejudice that senselessly contributes to the Native Americans' modern history of pain."