An ilkak'mana called Multnomah once lived near the river where New England merchants chopped Portland, Oregon, out of a Douglas-fir forest. With a bow and shield slung behind his back, the chief stood imperiously in Hermon A. MacNeil's 1904 statuette inscribed at its base with his name. Nearby tribes preserved Multnomah in words, but years later…

Introduces a document providing an extremely rare mission Indian eyewitness account of the waning years of the California Franciscan missions, an 1877 interview with a Costanoan Indian--a former mission neophyte--dealing with mission discipline, secularization, and demise of the Indian population. Provides background to elucidate the document.…

In Leslie Marmon Silko's 1977 novel "Ceremony" the "primacy of the geographical" has often been interpreted as a particularly holistic and healing sense of place--what the critic Robert M. Nelson has characterized as the "spirit of place." This heightened awareness of the spiritual and redemptive power of the natural and the imaginative in…

Reviews life and literature of Zitkala Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), Sioux Indian born in 1876 on Yankton Reservation (South Dakota), educated at Quaker schools and Earlham College (Indiana), accomplished orator, author of autobiographical essays and short stories, worker for Indian reform, lecturer, and founder of National Council of American…

Argues that native American folk history is not just legend, but often oral history told from a different viewpoint. Compares stories from the Kashaya Pomo living near Fort Ross with Russian and English historical accounts to enlarge the picture of an 1833 Hudson's Bay expedition in California. Contains 14 references. (DHP)

This article examines competing views of representation and authorship regarding Native American communities in a variety of projects supported by the Federal Writers' Project (FWP), including the American Guide series and state-sponsored works. The author begins by briefly contextualizing the FWP's Native American projects within the shifting…

Oral and documentary sources describe the buildings, enrollment, academic classes, vocational training, and the networks of social relations comprising the reality of boarding school life for students at Chilocco Indian Agricultural School from 1920-1940. Five former students discuss their impressions of discipline and daily schedules. (NEC)

Stories handed down from Dakota grandmother to granddaughter were rooted in a kinship responsibility to relay the culture, identity, and sense of belonging essential to a child's life. Conveyed by Native storytellers rigorously trained in oral tradition, historical "stories" have a reliability not found in mainstream oral history.…

The Camp Grant Massacre remains a salient moment for contemporary Western Apache peoples. Although a difficult part of their history, it continues to instruct Apaches and non-Apaches about the sacrifices of those who have gone before and the circumstances that have shaped the modern world. The story of the massacre was first preserved by personal…

This article discusses how Native women in Thunder Bay, Ontario, organized services and programs to help women adapt to urban life in the 1970s and 1980s. It investigates the founding of Beendigen, an emergency hostel for Native women and their children. In 1978, Thunder Bay Anishinabequek, a chapter of the Ontario Native Women's Association…