The data from a longitudinal study of seven indigenous justice service organizations in four colonized countries were analyzed to identify the characteristics that made them "indigenous." Although nine common organizational characteristics emerged, of these, four are essential and specific to indigenous organizations (dependency on…

In this article, the author addresses the burden of non-Native expectation on Native artists, highlighting issues of authenticity, creation, and public display. The author writes about the booth sitters hired by collectors to sit--sometimes all night--and wait for the official opening of the annual Indian Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He focuses…

This article explores ways of creating public art, ways of looking, and ways of remembering. It focuses on how one work in Albuquerque, New Mexico, twines around these three notions and produces new ways of thinking about each. In this article, the author focuses on one component within a larger work of public art--"Numbe Whageh" by Nora…

Scholars analyzing events in American Indian history have the responsibility to consider not only the White political and social milieu but also American Indian world views, kinship ties, and political and spiritual influences. The Walla Walla Council of 1855, involving U.S. officials and Northwest Plateau tribes, illustrates the importance of…

The genocide of American Indians over the last five centuries is documented by the persecutors in myriad historical media: diaries, audiotapes, autobiographies, photographs, books, essays, and newspaper accounts. Many authors believe that their stories convey an objective reality but scholarship has illustrated that writers construct history more…

In the early 1970s James Welch enters American literature as an Indian postmodernist, a fractured classicist of the West, drawing fragments from both sides of the Buckskin Curtain. Reading the likes of Cesar Vallejo and early modernists from Ezra Pound to Theodore Roethke and decreationists such as Ray Carver (through Richard Hugo's tutelage at…

Considering the sizable number of visitors to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument on the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana each year (more than four hundred thousand in fiscal year 2002), careful examination of the prominence of "Custer's Last Stand" in American mythology, and the widespread use of the phrase…

In the winter of 1883, the photographer H. H. Bennett decided to spice up his descriptive catalogue of stereo views with something new. Several years earlier, a simple listing of his photographs--mostly landscape views of the area surrounding the Wisconsin River Dells--brought the small-town studio photographer considerable renown and enhanced…

Social images of Indian/white relations, so typically born and nurtured in fiction, frequently seem impervious to fact, circumstance, perspective, or even argument. Despite a public that in record numbers consumed descriptions like the one that closes Dee Brown's 1971 book, for instance, official accounts of the massacre at Wounded Knee--like…