Browsing by Subject "Native Americans"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Differences in forest composition following two periods of settlement by pre-Columbian Native Americans
    (Springer, 2022-10-01) Commerford, Julie L.; Gittens, Gabrielle; Gainforth, Sydney; Wilson, Jeremy J.; Bird, Broxton W.; Earth Sciences, School of Science
    Temperate broadleaf forests in eastern North America are diverse ecosystems whose vegetation composition has shifted over the last several millennia in response to climatic and human drivers. Yet, detailed records of long-term changes in vegetation composition and diversity in response to known periods of human activity, particularly multiple distinct periods of human activity at the same site, are still relatively sparse. In this study, we examine a sediment record from Avery Lake, Illinois, USA, using multiple metrics derived from pollen data to infer vegetation composition and diversity over the last 3,000 years. This 3,000-year history encompasses the Baumer (300 bce–300 ce) and Mississippian settlements (1150–1450 ce) at Kincaid Mounds (adjacent to Avery Lake), and captures differences in the impact that these groups had on vegetation composition. Both groups actively cleared the local landscape for settlement and horticultural/agricultural purposes. Given the persistence of fire-tolerant Quercus in conjunction with declines in other tree taxa, this clearing likely occurred through the use of fire. We also apply a self-organized mapping technique to the multivariate pollen assemblages to identify similarities and differences in vegetation composition across time. Those results suggest that the vegetation surrounding Avery Lake was compositionally similar before and after the Baumer settlement, but compositionally different after the Mississippian settlement. The end of the Mississippian settlement occurred simultaneously with a regional shift in moisture characterized by drier summers and wetter winters associated with the Little Ice Age (1250–1850 ce), which likely prevented this ecosystem from returning to its pre-Mississippian composition.
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    In Alaska, it’s always been Denali
    (The Conversation US, Inc., 2015-09-04) Cusack-McVeigh, Holly; Anthropology, School of Liberal Arts
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    On an Eighteenth-Century Trail of Tears The Travel Diary of Johann Jacob Schmick of the Moravian Indian Congregation’s Journey to the Susquehanna, 1765
    (2015) Wheeler, Rachel; Hahn-Bruckart, Thomas; Department of Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    This piece is a translation of a travel journal kept by missionary Johann Jacob Schmick as he traveled with the Moravian Indian congregation from Philadelphia to the Susquehanna in 1765. The community of mostly Delaware and Mohican Indians had been living under armed guard at the Philadelphia Barracks following the violence instigated by Pontiac’s Revolt and the Paxton Boys uprising. The community’s settlement on the Susquehanna marked a new model of Moravian mission and serves as an early example of Indian removal, particularly noteworthy in this instance because the community was composed of Christian Indians.
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    Overlooking the Indigenous Midwest: Prince Maximilian of Wied in New Harmony
    (2021-11) Wertz, Kyle Timothy; Guiliano, Jennifer; Wokeck, Marianne S.; Rowe, Stephanie
    In the winter of 1832-1833, German scientist and aristocrat Prince Maximilian of Wied spent five months in the Indiana town of New Harmony during a two-year expedition to the interior of North America. Maximilian’s observations of Native Americans west of the Mississippi River have influenced European and white American perceptions of the Indigenous peoples of North America for nearly two centuries, but his time in New Harmony has gone understudied. This article explores his personal journal and his published travelogue to discover what Maximilian’s time in New Harmony reveals about his work. New Harmony exposed him to a wealth of information about Native Americans produced by educated white elites like himself. However, Maximilian missed opportunities to encounter Native Americans first-hand in and around New Harmony, which he wrongly thought required crossing the Mississippi River. Because of the biases and misperceptions caused by Maximilian’s racialized worldview and stereotypical expectations of Native American life, he overlooked the Indigenous communities and individuals living in Indiana.
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    Review of Daniel R. Mandell's Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880
    (MIT Press, 2009) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    Virtually every nineteenth-century local history of a New England town begins with a chapter about the last “red man” to have lived there. The tone is generally somber but optimistic—marking the sad but inevitable passing away of a noble race, thus allowing for the rise of true civilization. Scholarship of the last decade or so has been chipping away at this trope, but none has done so as comprehensively as Mandell. Studies of New England Indian history are rich, though heavily weighted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the larger field of Indian history, the Old Northwest garners most attention in the era of the early Republic, before shifting to the Southeast in the era of Removal, and the West in the latter half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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    Review of Linford D. Fisher's The Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America
    (The University of Chicago Press, 2014) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    Linford Fisher’s The Indian Great Awakening joins a growing body of scholarship on Native American engagement with Christianity. Much of that work so far (including my own) has focused on particular individuals or communities. Fisher’s is the first to take a broader, longer scope to survey the landscape of Native engagement with Christianity in southern New England (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Long Island, and western Massachusetts) through the eighteenth century (1700–1820), and it offers a welcome contribution. Fisher’s aim is to understand Native encounter with Christianity “in the fullest possible context of local colonial interactions and the broader, transatlantic tugs of imperial power.”
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    Surviving the Perfect Storm of Diabetes in the World of the Schitsu'umsh
    (2010-10-21) Tiedt, Jane A.; Sloan, Rebecca S.; Frey, Rodney, 1950-; Mays, Rose M.; Pesut, Daniel J.
    Diabetes is a significant health problem in the United States which disproportionately affects Native Americans. Despite many new prevention and intervention programs, there has been a prolific increase in the incidence of diabetes among Native Americans. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experience of Coeur d’Alene tribal members living with type 2 diabetes using a Heideggerian hermeneutic framework. Participants were recruited through the local diabetes educator at the tribal clinic using purposive and snowball sampling. Individual interviews were conducted with ten Coeur d’Alene tribal members whom had type 2 diabetes and were willing to share their stories of about living with diabetes. Participants ranged in age from 26-86. Interviews lasted from 25-90 minutes and focused on gathering stories about their daily life with their diabetes, and barriers and supports to their diabetes self-management. These became the data for hermeneutic interpretations. Individual transcripts were read and reread for initial themes. Next, comparisons between and across transcripts were done through interpretive emersion into the texts. Emerging themes and patterns were brought before a group of qualitative nurse researchers and doctoral students as a means of cross-checking and validating interpretations. Perseverance was the overarching pattern in the stories of living with diabetes in the world of Schitsu’umsh. The four themes that emerged under the umbrella of perseverance were valuing tribal traditions, being inattentively caring, struggling with disease burdens, and experiencing tensions in patient-provider relations. Living with diabetes in the world of the Schitsu’umsh was always a tenuous balancing act. There was an ever present dialectic tension between strengths and barriers underlying their daily struggles for balance. By increasing our understanding of Native American experiences of living with diabetes, collaborative partnerships can be developed with the tribes to address these barriers to diabetes self-management and to develop culturally relevant diabetes education programs. There is also a need to address cultural competence by the health care community and to work at eliminating biases and prejudice in our healthcare system. This work brings new cultural understandings of what it means to live with diabetes in one Native American group.