The arrival of European settlers in the Americas disrupted indigenous lifeways, and the effects of colonialism shattered Native communities. Forced migration and human trafficking created a diaspora of cultures, languages, and people. Gregory D. Smithers and Brooke N. Newman have gathered the work of leading scholars, including Bill Anthes, Duane Champagne, Daniel Cobb, Donald Fixico, and Joy Porter, among others, in examining an expansive range of Native peoples and the extent of their influences through reaggregation. These diverse and wide-ranging essays uncover indigenous understandings of self-identification, community, and culture through the speeches, cultural products, intimate relations, and political and legal practices of Native peoples.
Native Diasporas explores how indigenous peoples forged a sense of identity and community amid the changes wrought by European colonialism in the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, and the mainland Americas from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. Broad in scope and groundbreaking in the topics it explores, this volume presents fresh insights from scholars devoted to understanding Native American identity in meaningful and methodologically innovative ways.
The arrival of European settlers in the Americas disrupted indigenous lifeways, and the effects of colonialism shattered Native communities. Forced migration and human trafficking created a diaspora of cultures, languages, and people. Gregory D. Smithers and Brooke N. Newman have gathered the work of leading scholars, including Bill Anthes, Duane Champagne, Daniel Cobb, Donald Fixico, and Joy Porter, among others, in examining an expansive range of Native peoples and the extent of their influences through reaggregation. These diverse and wide-ranging essays uncover indigenous understandings of self-identification, community, and culture through the speeches, cultural products, intimate relations, and political and legal practices of Native peoples.
Native Diasporas explores how indigenous peoples forged a sense of identity and community amid the changes wrought by European colonialism in the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, and the mainland Americas from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. Broad in scope and groundbreaking in the topics it explores, this volume presents fresh insights from scholars devoted to understanding Native American identity in meaningful and methodologically innovative ways.
List of Illustrations
Preface
Brooke N. Newman and Gregory D. Smithers
Introduction: “What Is an Indian?”—The Enduring Question of
American Indian Identity
Gregory D. Smithers
Part 1. Adapting Indigenous Identities for the Colonial
Diaspora
1. Indigenous Identities in Mesoamerica after the Spanish
Conquest
Rebecca Horn
2. Rethinking the Middle Ground: French Colonialism and Indigenous
Identities in the Pays d’en Haut
Michael A. McDonnell
3. Identity Articulated: British Settlers, Black Caribs, and the
Politics of Indigeneity on St. Vincent, 1763–1797
Brooke N. Newman
4. Religion, Race, and the Formation of Pan-Indian Identities in
the Brothertown Movement, 1700–1800
Linford D. Fisher
5. “Decoying Them Within”: Creek Gender Identities and the
Subversion of Civilization
Felicity Donohoe
Part 2. Asserting Native Identities through Politics, Work, and
Migration
6. Mastering Language: Liberty, Slavery, and Native Resistance in
the Early Nineteenth-Century South
James Taylor Carson
7. Resistance and Removal: Yaqui and Navajo Identities in the
Southwest Borderlands
Claudia B. Haake
8. Progressivism and Native American Self-Expression in the Late
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century
Joy Porter
9. Mixed-Descent Indian Identity and Assimilation Policy
Katherine Ellinghaus
10. “All Go to the Hop Fields”: The Role of Migratory and Wage
Labor in the Preservation of Indigenous Pacific Northwest
Culture
Vera Parham
Part 3. Twentieth-Century Reflections on Indigenous and Pan-Indian
Identities
11. Tribal Institution Building in the Twentieth Century
Duane Champagne
12. Disease and the “Other”: The Role of Medical Imperialism in
Oceania
Kerri A. Inglis
13. “Why Injun Artist Me”: Acee Blue Eagle’s Diasporic
Performative
Bill Anthes
14. Asserting a Global Indigenous Identity: Native Activism Before
and After the Cold War
Daniel M. Cobb
15. From Tribal to Indian: American Indian Identity in the
Twentieth Century
Donald Fixico
Contributors
Index
Gregory D. Smithers teaches history at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of three books, including Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780s–1890s. Brooke N. Newman is an assistant professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her articles have appeared in Gender and History and Slavery and Abolition.
"The essays in Native Diasporas address a tremendously important and complicated subject - Indigenous identity." - Barbara Krauthamer, author of Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South "In a powerful and timely way, Native Diasporas moves away from the 'frontier' as finite and from the 'middle ground' as an endpoint. Its essays pay attention to women's agency, gender issues, economic and political dynamics, the history of changing policies, and to Indigenous responses and engagements with settler colonialism." - Ann McGrath, director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at Australian National University and coauthor of How to Write History that People Want to Read
![]() |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
![]() |