The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso, Culture and History in the Upper Amazon

Download The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso, Culture and History in the Upper Amazon PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813516851
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (168 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso, Culture and History in the Upper Amazon by : Blanca Muratorio

Download or read book The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso, Culture and History in the Upper Amazon written by Blanca Muratorio and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Blanca Muratorio's book, we are introduced to Rucuyaya Alonso, an elderly Quichua Indian of the Upper Ecuadorean Amazon. Alonso is a hunter, but like most Quichuas, he has done other work as well, bearing loads, panning gold, tapping rubber trees, and working for Shell Oil. He tells of his work, his hunting, his marriage, his fights, his fears, and his dreams. His story covers about a century because he incorporates the oral tradition of his father and grandfather along with his own memories. Through his life story, we learn about the social and economic life of that region. Chapters of Alonso's life history and oral tradition alternate with chapters detailing the history of the world around him--the domination of missionaries, the white settlers' expropriation of land, the debt system workers were subjected to, the rubber boom, the world-wide crisis of the 1930s, and the booms and busts of the international oil market. Muratorio explains the larger social, economic, and ideological bases of white domination over native peoples in Amazonia. She shows how through everyday actions and thoughts, the Quichua Indians resisted attacks against their social identity, their ethnic dignity, and their symbolic systems. They were far from submissive, as they have often been portrayed.

The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso, Culture and History in the Upper Amazon

Download The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso, Culture and History in the Upper Amazon PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813516851
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (168 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso, Culture and History in the Upper Amazon by : Blanca Muratorio

Download or read book The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso, Culture and History in the Upper Amazon written by Blanca Muratorio and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Blanca Muratorio's book, we are introduced to Rucuyaya Alonso, an elderly Quichua Indian of the Upper Ecuadorean Amazon. Alonso is a hunter, but like most Quichuas, he has done other work as well, bearing loads, panning gold, tapping rubber trees, and working for Shell Oil. He tells of his work, his hunting, his marriage, his fights, his fears, and his dreams. His story covers about a century because he incorporates the oral tradition of his father and grandfather along with his own memories. Through his life story, we learn about the social and economic life of that region. Chapters of Alonso's life history and oral tradition alternate with chapters detailing the history of the world around him--the domination of missionaries, the white settlers' expropriation of land, the debt system workers were subjected to, the rubber boom, the world-wide crisis of the 1930s, and the booms and busts of the international oil market. Muratorio explains the larger social, economic, and ideological bases of white domination over native peoples in Amazonia. She shows how through everyday actions and thoughts, the Quichua Indians resisted attacks against their social identity, their ethnic dignity, and their symbolic systems. They were far from submissive, as they have often been portrayed.

Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador

Download Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN 13 : 082297116X
Total Pages : 361 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (229 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador by : A. Kim Clark

Download or read book Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador written by A. Kim Clark and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2007-08-26 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador chronicles the changing forms of indigenous engagement with the Ecuadorian state since the early nineteenth century that, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, had facilitated the growth of the strongest unified indigenous movement in Latin America.Built around nine case studies from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ecuador, Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador presents state formation as an uneven process, characterized by tensions and contradictions, in which Indians and other subalterns actively participated. It examines how indigenous peoples have attempted, sometimes successfully, to claim control over state formation in order to improve their relative position in society. The book concludes with four comparative essays that place indigenous organizational strategies in highland Ecuador within a larger Latin American historical context. Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of state formation that will be of interest to a broad range of scholars who study how subordinate groups participate in and contest state formation.

The Metamorphosis of the Amazon

Download The Metamorphosis of the Amazon PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009343076
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (93 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Metamorphosis of the Amazon by : Maximilian Fritz Feichtner

Download or read book The Metamorphosis of the Amazon written by Maximilian Fritz Feichtner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling study for readers interested in the environmental history of Latin America, this book sheds light on the complex history of the Ecuadorian rainforest and the impact oil development. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador

Download The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252072550
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (725 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador by : Michael Uzendoski

Download or read book The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador written by Michael Uzendoski and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2005-07-29 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based upon historical and archival research, as well as the author's years of fieldwork in indigenous communities, Michael Uzendoski's theoretically informed work analyzes value from the perspective of the Napo Runa people of the Amazonian Ecuador. Written in a clear and readable style, The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador presents theoretical issues of value, poetics, and kinship as linked to the author's intersubjective experiences in Napo Runa culture. Drawing on insights from the theory of gift and value, Uzendoski argues that Napo Runa culture personifies value by transforming things into people through a process of subordinating them to human relationships. While many traditional exchange models treat the production of things as inconsequential, the Napo Runa understand production to involve a relationship with natural beings (plants, animals, spirits of the forest), which are considered to be subjects that share spiritual substance, or samai. Throughout the book, value is revealed as the outcome of a complicated poetics of transformation by which things and persons are woven into kinship forms that define daily social and ritual life.

Editing Eden

Download Editing Eden PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 0803228317
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (32 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Editing Eden by : Frank Hutchins

Download or read book Editing Eden written by Frank Hutchins and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent scholarship on the Amazon has challenged depictions of the region that emphasize its natural exuberance or represent its residents as historically isolated peoples stoically resisting challenges from powerful global forces. The contributors to this volume follow this lead by situating the discussion of the Amazon and its inhabitants at the intersections of identity politics, debates about socioeconomic sovereignty, and processes of place making. ø Editing Eden focuses on case studies from Amazonian Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador regarding the themes of indigeneity, community making, development politics, and the transcendence of indigenous/nonindigenous divides. Portraits of the Amazon emerge through an analysis of indigenous identity as a product of multiple sources, including state policies toward Amazonian populations, the views of foreign ecotourists, the agendas of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and accounts of journalists. At the same time, indigenous and nonindigenous Amazonians challenge the representations constructed for and about them by integrating anthropologists and other nonlocals into their reciprocal systems of gift giving, or by utilizing NGO or ecotourist dollars to support their own cultural agendas. Editing Eden offers insights from leading anthropologists of the region, providing perspectives on the Amazon beyond the counterfeit paradise but short of El Dorado.

Slavery and Utopia

Download Slavery and Utopia PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 1477316434
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (773 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Slavery and Utopia by : Fernando Santos-Granero

Download or read book Slavery and Utopia written by Fernando Santos-Granero and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2018-09-19 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first half of the twentieth century, a charismatic Peruvian Amazonian indigenous chief, José Carlos Amaringo Chico, played a key role in leading his people, the Ashaninka, through the chaos generated by the collapse of the rubber economy in 1910 and the subsequent pressures of colonists, missionaries, and government officials to assimilate them into the national society. Slavery and Utopia reconstructs the life and political trajectory of this leader whom the people called Tasorentsi, the name the Ashaninka give to the world-transforming gods and divine emissaries that come to this earth to aid the Ashaninka in times of crisis. Fernando Santos-Granero follows Tasorentsi’s transformations as he evolved from being a debt-peon and quasi-slave to being a slave raider; inspirer of an Ashaninka movement against white-mestizo rubber extractors and slave traffickers; paramount chief of a multiethnic, anti-colonial, and anti-slavery uprising; and enthusiastic preacher of an indigenized version of Seventh-Day Adventist doctrine, whose world-transforming message and personal influence extended well beyond Peru’s frontiers. Drawing on an immense body of original materials ranging from archival documents and oral histories to musical recordings and visual works, Santos-Granero presents an in-depth analysis of chief Tasorentsi’s political discourse and actions. He demonstrates that, despite Tasorentsi’s constant self-reinventions, the chief never forsook his millenarian beliefs, anti-slavery discourse, or efforts to liberate his people from white-mestizo oppression. Slavery and Utopia thus convincingly refutes those who claim that the Ashaninka proclivity to messianism is an anthropological invention.

Trekking Through History

Download Trekking Through History PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231506228
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Trekking Through History by : Laura M. Rival

Download or read book Trekking Through History written by Laura M. Rival and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002-06-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Huaorani of Ecuador lived as hunters and gatherers in the Amazonian rainforest for hundred of years, largely undisturbed by western civilization. Since their first encounter with North American missionaries in 1956, they have held a special place in journalistic and popular imagination as "Ecuador's last savages." Trekking Through History is the first description of Huaorani society and culture according to modern standards of ethnographic writing. Through her comprehensive study of their extraordinary tradition of trekking, Laura Rival shows that the Huaorani cannot be seen merely as anachronistic survivors of the Spanish Conquest. Her critical reappraisal of the notions of agricultural regression and cultural devolution challenges the universal application of the thesis that marginal tribes of the Amazon Basin represent devolved populations who have lost their knowledge of agriculture. Far from being an evolutionary event, trekking expresses cultural creativity and political agency. Through her detailed comparative discussion of native Amazonian representations of history and the environment, Rival illustrates the unique way the Huaorani have socialized nature by choosing to depend on resources created in the past—highlighting the unique contribution anthropology makes to the study of environmental history.

God in the Rainforest

Download God in the Rainforest PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190609001
Total Pages : 662 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (96 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis God in the Rainforest by : Kathryn T. Long

Download or read book God in the Rainforest written by Kathryn T. Long and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In January of 1956, five young evangelical missionaries were speared to death by a band of the Waorani people in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Two years later, two missionary women--the widow of one of the slain men and the sister of another--with the help of a Wao woman were able to establish peaceful relations with the same people who had killed their loved ones. The highly publicized deaths of the five men and the subsequent efforts to Christianize the Waorani quickly became the defining missionary narrative for American evangelicals during the second half of the twentieth century. God in the Rainforest traces the formation of this story and shows how Protestant missionary work among the Waorani came to be one of the missions most celebrated by Evangelicals and most severely criticized by anthropologists and others who accused missionaries of destroying the indigenous culture. Kathryn T. Long offers a study of the complexities of world Christianity at the ground level for indigenous peoples and for missionaries, anthropologists, environmentalists, and other outsiders. For the first time, Long brings together these competing actors and agendas to reveal one example of an indigenous people caught in the cross-hairs of globalization.

Countering Modernity

Download Countering Modernity PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1040087469
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Countering Modernity by : Carolyn Smith-Morris

Download or read book Countering Modernity written by Carolyn Smith-Morris and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-11 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume highlights and examines how Indigenous Peoples continue to inhabit the world in counter-modern ways. It illustrates how communalist practices and cooperative priorities of many Indigenous communities are simultaneously key to their cultural survival while being most vulnerable to post-colonial erasure. Chapters contributed by community collectives, elders, lawyers, scholars, multi-generational collaboratives, and others are brought together to highlight the communal and cooperative strategies that counter the modernizing tropes of capitalist, industrialist, and representational hegemonies. Furthermore, the authors of the book explicitly interrogate the roles of witness, collaborator, advocate, and community leader as they consider ethical relations in contexts of financialized global markets, ongoing land grabbing and displacement, epistemic violence, and post-colonial erasures. Lucid and topical, the book will be indispensable for students and scholars of anthropology, modernity, capitalism, history, sociology, human rights, minority studies, Indigenous studies, Asian studies, and Latin American studies.

The Ecuador Reader

Download The Ecuador Reader PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822390116
Total Pages : 450 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Ecuador Reader by : Carlos de la Torre

Download or read book The Ecuador Reader written by Carlos de la Torre and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-16 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encompassing Amazonian rainforests, Andean peaks, coastal lowlands, and the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador’s geography is notably diverse. So too are its history, culture, and politics, all of which are examined from many perspectives in The Ecuador Reader. Spanning the years before the arrival of the Spanish in the early 1500s to the present, this rich anthology addresses colonialism, independence, the nation’s integration into the world economy, and its tumultuous twentieth century. Interspersed among forty-eight written selections are more than three dozen images. The voices and creations of Ecuadorian politicians, writers, artists, scholars, activists, and journalists fill the Reader, from José María Velasco Ibarra, the nation’s ultimate populist and five-time president, to Pancho Jaime, a political satirist; from Julio Jaramillo, a popular twentieth-century singer, to anonymous indigenous women artists who produced ceramics in the 1500s; and from the poems of Afro-Ecuadorians, to the fiction of the vanguardist Pablo Palacio, to a recipe for traditional Quiteño-style shrimp. The Reader includes an interview with Nina Pacari, the first indigenous woman elected to Ecuador’s national assembly, and a reflection on how to balance tourism with the protection of the Galápagos Islands’ magnificent ecosystem. Complementing selections by Ecuadorians, many never published in English, are samples of some of the best writing on Ecuador by outsiders, including an account of how an indigenous group with non-Inca origins came to see themselves as definitively Incan, an exploration of the fascination with the Andes from the 1700s to the present, chronicles of the less-than-exemplary behavior of U.S. corporations in Ecuador, an examination of Ecuadorians’ overseas migration, and a look at the controversy surrounding the selection of the first black Miss Ecuador.

Dance of the Dolphin

Download Dance of the Dolphin PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226761848
Total Pages : 358 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (618 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Dance of the Dolphin by : Candace Slater

Download or read book Dance of the Dolphin written by Candace Slater and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-09-15 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In folktales told throughout much of the Brazilian Amazon, dolphins take human form, attend raucous dances and festivals, seduce men and women, and carry them away to a city beneath the river. They are encantados, or Enchanted Beings, capable of provoking death or madness, but also called upon to help shamanic healers. Male dolphins—accomplished dancers who appear dressed in dapper straw hats, white suits, and with shiny black shoes—reportedly father numerous children. The females are said to lure away solitary fishermen. Both sinister and charming, these characters resist definition and thus domination; greedy and lascivious outsiders, they are increasingly symbolic of a distinctly Amazonian culture politically, socially, economically, and environmentally under seige. Candace Slater examines these stories in Dance of the Dolphin, both as folk narratives and as representations of culture and conflict in Amazonia. Her engaging study discusses the tales from the viewpoints of genre, performance, and gender, but centers on them as responses to the great changes sweeping the Amazon today. According to Slater, these surprisingly widespread tales reflect Amazonians' own mixed reactions to the ongoing destruction of the rainforest and the resulting transformations in the social as well as physical landscape. Offering an informed view of Brazilian culture, this book crosses the boundaries of folklore, literature, anthropology, and Latin American studies. It is one of the very few studies to offer an overview of the changes taking place in Amazonia through the eyes of ordinary people. "This book is a rich collection of stories about the transformation of dolphins in the city of enchantment. . . . The joy in this book is not just its vibrant analysis and careful relating of tradition and lore, but also its uncanny accurateness in capturing the very essence of Amazonia."-Darrell Posey, Journal of Latin American Studies "Slater's fluid prose reads like a novel for those interested in Amazonian culture and folklore, while her integrated approach makes this a must read for those interested in innovative methodology."-Lisa Gabbert, Western Folklore

The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas

Download The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521630764
Total Pages : 1000 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (37 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas by : Bruce G. Trigger

Download or read book The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas written by Bruce G. Trigger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 1000 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Library holds volume 2, part 2 only.

Governing Indigenous Territories

Download Governing Indigenous Territories PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822378922
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Governing Indigenous Territories by : Juliet S. Erazo

Download or read book Governing Indigenous Territories written by Juliet S. Erazo and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governing Indigenous Territories illuminates a paradox of modern indigenous lives. In recent decades, native peoples from Alaska to Cameroon have sought and gained legal title to significant areas of land, not as individuals or families but as large, collective organizations. Obtaining these collective titles represents an enormous accomplishment; it also creates dramatic changes. Once an indigenous territory is legally established, other governments and organizations expect it to act as a unified political entity, making decisions on behalf of its population and managing those living within its borders. A territorial government must mediate between outsiders and a not-always-united population within a context of constantly shifting global development priorities. The people of Rukullakta, a large indigenous territory in Ecuador, have struggled to enact sovereignty since the late 1960s. Drawing broadly applicable lessons from their experiences of self-rule, Juliet S. Erazo shows how collective titling produces new expectations, obligations, and subjectivities within indigenous territories.

The Ecotourism-Extraction Nexus

Download The Ecotourism-Extraction Nexus PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135945268
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (359 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Ecotourism-Extraction Nexus by : Bram Büscher

Download or read book The Ecotourism-Extraction Nexus written by Bram Büscher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecotourism and natural resource extraction may be seen as contradictory pursuits, yet in reality they often take place side by side, sometimes even supported by the same institutions. Existing academic and policy literatures generally overlook the phenomenon of ecotourism in areas concurrently affected by extraction industries, but such a scenario is in fact increasingly common in resource-rich developing nations. This edited volume conceptualises and empirically analyses the ‘ecotourism-extraction nexus’ within the context of broader rural and livelihood changes in the places where these activities occur. The volume’s central premise is that these seemingly contradictory activities are empirically and conceptually more alike than often imagined, and that they share common ground in ethnographic lived experiences in rural settings and broader political economic structures of power and control. The book offers theoretical reflections on why ecotourism and natural resource extraction are systematically decoupled, and epistemologically and analytically re-links them through ethnographic case studies drawing on research from around the world. It should be of interest to students and professionals engaged in the disciplines of geography, anthropology and development studies.

In Amazonia

Download In Amazonia PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400865271
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis In Amazonia by : Hugh Raffles

Download or read book In Amazonia written by Hugh Raffles and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Amazon is not what it seems. As Hugh Raffles shows us in this captivating and innovative book, the world's last great wilderness has been transformed again and again by human activity. In Amazonia brings to life an Amazon whose allure and reality lie as much, or more, in what people have made of it as in what nature has wrought. It casts new light on centuries of encounter while describing the dramatic remaking of a sweeping landscape by residents of one small community in the Brazilian Amazon. Combining richly textured ethnographic research and lively historical analysis, Raffles weaves a fascinating story that changes our understanding of this region and challenges us to rethink what we mean by "nature." Raffles draws from a wide range of material to demonstrate--in contrast to the tendency to downplay human agency in the Amazon--that the region is an outcome of the intimately intertwined histories of humans and nonhumans. He moves between a detailed narrative that analyzes the production of scientific knowledge about Amazonia over the centuries and an absorbing account of the extraordinary transformations to the fluvial landscape carried out over the past forty years by the inhabitants of Igarapé Guariba, four hours downstream from the nearest city. Engagingly written, theoretically inventive, and vividly illustrated, the book introduces a diverse range of characters--from sixteenth-century explorers and their native rivals to nineteenth-century naturalists and contemporary ecologists, logging company executives, and river-traders. A natural history of a different kind, In Amazonia shows how humans, animals, rivers, and forests all participate in the making of a region that remains today at the center of debates in environmental politics.

Standing Up with Ga'axsta'las

Download Standing Up with Ga'axsta'las PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : UBC Press
ISBN 13 : 0774823860
Total Pages : 597 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (748 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Standing Up with Ga'axsta'las by : Leslie A. Robertson

Download or read book Standing Up with Ga'axsta'las written by Leslie A. Robertson and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2012-10-07 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las tells the remarkable story of Jane Constance Cook (1870-1951), a controversial Kwakwaka’wakw leader and activist who lived during a period of enormous colonial upheaval. Working collaboratively, Robertson and Cook’s descendants draw on oral histories and textual records to create a nuanced portrait of a high-ranked woman, a cultural mediator, devout Christian, and aboriginal rights activist who criticized potlatch practices for surprising reasons. This powerful meditation on memory and cultural renewal documents how the Kwagu’l Gixsam have revived their long-dormant clan in the hopes of forging a positive cultural identity for future generations through feasting and potlatching.