In this keynote address, the author talks about Indigenous peoples who are presently in a dynamic circumstance of constant change that they are facing courageously with creative collaboration and syncretism. In the address, the author speaks "of" an Indigenous consciousness and he speaks "with" an Indigenous consciousness so that Indigenous…

In this article, the author describes her experience as an Indigenous researcher conducting dissertation research on Passamaquoddy ideas of health and decision making in her home community and how these can be applied in contemporary tribal health decision-making processes. The author comes from Sibyig, on the edge, she is related to the people of…

Many commercial images and names linked to Native Americans are created for and perpetuated by popular culture and stem from past linguistic usage. In this article the authors present a case study of the questionable naming and the quiet, almost unnoticed, righting of a name for a Native derived garment in the American clothing industry, the…

Arming themselves with "manifest destiny" rhetoric, which claimed divine Anglo-Saxon superiority as justification for the conquest of Indigenous and Mexican peoples and the land they occupied, white settlers forcefully pushed into California territory. The two-year-long Mexican-American War resulted in the acquisition of the present-day…

While radio personality Will Rogers's pioneering role in radio is obvious (he worked in the medium during its earliest years), its connections to Cherokee and other tribal technologies have been neglected. This failure to recognize Rogers's part in this particular strain of Cherokee history is a symptom of a larger cultural illness in the United…

"Dialectic" and "dialogic" are terms that can be used to describe the internal textual conflict and engagement between two cultures. Codeswitching is a linguistic strategy used by Native poets to emphasize the dialectic or dialogic cross-cultural interaction between the hegemonic Euro-American and First Nations cultures. This idea is well…

The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma is headquartered in southeastern Oklahoma and has a tribal citizenry of just over 175,000. The tribal government currently compacts almost all of the tribe's Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian Health Service program funding and runs dozens of tribal businesses that today fund more than 80 percent of the tribal…

In this article, the author talks about his Dakota ancestry. Here, he also talks about "Lamenting Dakota Language Loss," a paper he delivered at the 2004 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention. At the convention, he raised several questions regarding the revitalization of endangered Native American languages. Among other things, he points…

This document discusses the teaching of Indigenous languages. Immersion programs have become very popular over that past few years, and serve as an effective tool to teaching languages. In addition to language immersions, conferences and language revivals are also effective tools in teaching languages. This document provides an overview of these…

This article features the museums of Oaxaca, the place where the community museum movement in Mexico got started. Oaxaca has the largest Indigenous population in Mexico, with about 36.6% of the population over five years old, or about 1.027 million people, speaking an Indigenous language. Tourists spend large amounts on group or personalized tours…

As many linguists continue to work with and analyze First Nations/Native American languages, the consensus opinion usually direly predicts the loss of daily use for almost all of the extant Indigenous languages. Tremendous efforts are being expended for renewing, revitalizing, and restoring these languages to everyday use. The model upon which…

As was this author's usual habit at the university in Nebraska where she was teaching, she picked up a copy of the campus newspaper to read during her office hours. She was dismayed at a story entitled "Lakota May Appear on Sheridan County Polls." It read, in part: "Sheridan County's polls may have to add an unexpected language to…

Language decline in many immigrant and ethnic communities is always a persistent problem in America. To prevent Native tribal languages from becoming obliterated, several organizations have been founded to document and teach Indigenous languages, a number of tribes have crafted ambitious language policies, and Congress approved the Native American…

White and Hopi antiracist scholars and activists from working-class backgrounds, the authors write from a common heritage of claiming social origins the academy deems suspect. Refusing to abandon their social origins at the gate of the ivory tower, they name the colonial foundations of the academy and seek a new naming through their…

Extends use of evolutionary theory in understanding developmental processes within societies for examining patterns occuring between societies. Emphasizes North American Indian situations. Examines four degrees of intersocietal integration: first contact, low, medium and high. (MH)