BiblioVault - Books about Government relations

Gender, Indian, Nation: The Contradictions of Making Ecuador, 1830–1925
Erin O'Connor
University of Arizona Press, 2007
Library of Congress F3721.3.S65O36 2007 | Dewey Decimal 305.8980866

Until recently, few scholars outside of Ecuador studied the country’s history. In the past few years, however, its rising tide of indigenous activism has brought unprecedented attention to this small Andean nation. Even so, until now the significance of gender issues to the development of modern Indian-state relations has not often been addressed. As she digs through Ecuador’s past to find key events and developments that explain the simultaneous importance and marginalization of indigenous women in Ecuador today, Erin O’Connor usefully deploys gender analysis to illuminate broader relationships between nation-states and indigenous communities.

O’Connor begins her investigations by examining the multilayered links between gender and Indian-state relations in nineteenth-century Ecuador. Disentangling issues of class and culture from issues of gender, she uncovers overlapping, conflicting, and ever-evolving patriarchies within both indigenous communities and the nation’s governing bodies. She finds that gender influenced sociopolitical behavior in a variety of ways, mediating interethnic struggles and negotiations that ultimately created the modern nation. Her deep research into primary sources—including congressional debates, ministerial reports, court cases, and hacienda records—allows a richer, more complex, and better informed national history to emerge.

Examining gender during Ecuadorian state building from “above” and “below,” O’Connor uncovers significant processes of interaction and agency during a critical period in the nation’s history. On a larger scale, her work suggests the importance of gender as a shaping force in the formation of nation-states in general while it questions recountings of historical events that fail to demonstrate an awareness of the centrality of gender in the unfolding of those events.

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The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans and Whites in the Progressive Era
By Tom Holm
University of Texas Press, 2005
Library of Congress E98.C89H65 2005 | Dewey Decimal 305.89707309041

The United States government thought it could make Indians “vanish.” After the Indian Wars ended in the 1880s, the government gave allotments of land to individual Native Americans in order to turn them into farmers and sent their children to boarding schools for indoctrination into the English language, Christianity, and the ways of white people. Federal officials believed that these policies would assimilate Native Americans into white society within a generation or two. But even after decades of governmental efforts to obliterate Indian culture, Native Americans refused to vanish into the mainstream, and tribal identities remained intact. This revisionist history reveals how Native Americans' sense of identity and “peoplehood” helped them resist and eventually defeat the U.S. government's attempts to assimilate them into white society during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). Tom Holm discusses how Native Americans, though effectively colonial subjects without political power, nonetheless maintained their group identity through their native languages, religious practices, works of art, and sense of homeland and sacred history. He also describes how Euro-Americans became increasingly fascinated by and supportive of Native American culture, spirituality, and environmental consciousness. In the face of such Native resiliency and non-Native advocacy, the government's assimilation policy became irrelevant and inevitably collapsed. The great confusion in Indian affairs during the Progressive Era, Holm concludes, ultimately paved the way for Native American tribes to be recognized as nations with certain sovereign rights.

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Greenlanders, Whales, and Whaling: Sustainability and Self-Determination in the Arctic
Richard A. Caulfield
Dartmouth College Press, 2000
Library of Congress E99.E7C38 1997 | Dewey Decimal 338.3729509982

Whaling has been central to the life of Greenland's Inuit peoples for at least 4000 years, but political, economic, technological, and regulatory changes have altered this ancient practice. Richard A. Caulfield reveals these impacts first by analyzing Home Rule and its success in Greenland, and then by looking at whaling's place in the contemporary Greenlandic economy and its evolving co-management regime. What emerges from his investigation is an intricate web connecting traditions of indigenous peoples, the promises and pitfalls of co-management, the influence of international whaling policies, the complexities of sustainability, and the power of culturally determined views shaping relationships between humans and their environment. Caulfield finds that controversy over whaling often arises from conflicting idea systems, rather than disagreement over biological resource management. Understanding the ways Greenlanders and outside interests have defined and negotiated these conflicts "gives us more than just an insight into how indigenous peoples are coping with a changing world," he writes. "It also provides us with a sense of the challenges we face as well."

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Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540 to 1988
Edited by Carol A. Smith
University of Texas Press, 1990
Library of Congress F1465.3.G6G82 1990 | Dewey Decimal 972.8100497

Violence in Central America, especially when directed against Indian populations, is not a new phenomenon. Yet few studies of the region have focused specifi cally on the relationship between Indians and the state, a relationship that may hold the key to understanding these conflicts. In this volume, noted historians and anthropologists pool their considerable expertise to analyze the situation in Guatemala, working from the premise that the Indian/state relationship is the single most important determinant of Guatemala’s distinctive history and social order. In chapters by such respected scholars as Robert Cormack, Ralph Lee Woodward, Christopher Lutz, Richard Adams, and Arturo Arias, the history of Indian activism in Guatemala unfolds. The authors reveal that the insistence of Guatemalan Indians on maintaining their distinctive cultural practices and traditions in the face of state attempts to eradicate them appears to have fostered the development of an increasingly oppressive state.

This historical insight into the forces that shaped modern Guatemala provides a context for understanding the extraordinary level of violence that enveloped the Indians of the western highlands in the 1980s, the continued massive assault on traditional religious and secular culture, the movement from a militarized state to a militarized civil society, and the major transformations taking place in Guatemala’s traditional export-oriented economy. In this sense, Guatemalan Indians and the State, 1540 to 1988 provides a revisionist social history of Guatemala.

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