Great Plains Ethnohistory

New Interdisciplinary Approaches

Rani-Henrik Andersson, Thierry Veyrié, Logan Sutton

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781496242112
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Great Plains Ethnohistory offers a collection of state-of-the-field work in Great Plains ethnohistory, both contemporary and historical, covering the traditional anthropological subfields of ethnography, cultural history, archaeology, and linguistics. As ethnohistory matured into an interdisciplinary endeavor in the 1950s with the formation of the American Society for Ethnohistory, historians and anthropologists developed scholarly methodology for the study of Native American societies from their own points of view. Within this developing framework, Native cultures of the Great Plains represented a foundational research area.

Great Plains Ethnohistory pays intellectual debts to Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks, whose research from the 1970s onward brought ethnohistorical approaches to the study of Native cultures, histories, and languages into the international community of the humanities and social sciences, sciences, and arts. The work of the scholars assembled in this volume advocates for an ethnohistory that continues to decompartmentalize Indigenous knowledge and scholarly methodologies, including some of the constructs, biases, and prejudices perpetuated within traditional scholarly disciplines.

Including essays by Gilles Havard, Joanna Scherer, Sebastian Braun, Brad KuuNUx TeeRIt Kroupa, and DeMallie and Parks themselves, among others, plus an afterword by Philip J. Deloria, this is an essential contribution to the scholarly field and a volume for undergraduate and graduate students and scholars who study Native American and Indigenous cultures.
 

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Ethnohistory in the Twenty-First Century
• 1. A Foot in the Field, a Foot in the Archive, and a Keen Editorial Eye: The Making of an Ethnohistorian
• Part 1. Changing Identities in the Indigenous Societies of the Great Plains
• 2. From Deslauriers to Deloria: French Identity in a Sioux Indian Family
• 3. Lakȟóta Modernities and the Ends of History: Little Big Man, Crow Dog, and Red Tomahawk in Context
• 4. “Although He Had the Ways of a Woman, He Was a Great Warrior”: Kúsaat in Nineteenth-Century Pawnee and Arikara Society
• 5. Hungry Narratives Turned on Their Head (or Danced on Their Toes?): Toward Decolonial Listening in Ethnohistorical Practice
• 6. Paradigms and Poetry: John G. Neihardt’s Cycle of the West
• Part 2. Symbols and Ceremonialism
• 7. From the Litter to the Horse: The Native American Ritual of “Lifting”
• 8. Remapping Northern Arapaho Space and Place in Plains Ethnohistory
• 9. “TiweNAsaakaričI nikuwetiresWAtwaáhAt aniinuuNUxtaahiwaáRA”: An Overview of Arikara Spirituality
• 10. “Under the Tree That Never Bloomed I Sat and Cried Because It Faded Away”: An Ethnohistory of Black Elk’s Visions
• Part 3. Kinship and Language
• 11. Comanche Society on the Reservation, 1875–1926, a Patrilineal Hypothesis: The Case of the Ketahto Yamparika
• 12. Linguistic Evidence of Contact between Northern Caddoan and Siouan Languages: Arikara-Pawnee Verbal Classifiers
• 13. Wooden Boatmen, Spirits, and Bushy Eyebrows: American Indian Names for the French in North America
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index