Barbara Alice Mann

Make a Beautiful Way is nothing less than a new way of looking at history—or more correctly, the reestablishment of a very old way. For too long, Euro-American discourse styles, emphasizing elite male privilege and conceptual linearity, have drowned out democratic and woman-centered Native approaches. Even when myopic western linearity is understood to be at work, analysis of Native American history, society, and culture has still been consistently placed in male custody. The recovery of women’s traditions is the overarching theme in this collection of essays that helps reframe Native issues as properly gendered. Paula Gunn Allen looks at Indian lifeways through the many stitches of Indian clothes and the many steps of their powwow fancy dances. Lee Maracle calls for reconstitution of traditional social structures, based on Native American ways of knowing. Kay Givens McGowan identifies the exact sites where female power was weakened through the imposition of European culture, so that we might more effectively strengthen precisely those sites. Finally, Barbara Alice Mann examines how communication between Natives who have federal recognition and those who do not, as well as between Natives east and west of the Mississippi, became dysfunctional, and outlines how to reestablish good relations for the benefit of all.

The Wisdom of Native American Women

Make a Beautiful Way

Gives voice to Native American women in this examination of Native American lifeways--including such quotidian matters as food, clothing and powwows--as well as Native ways of knowing and structuring society.

Daughters of Mother Earth

Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas provides a thorough, organized look at the social, political, economic, and religious roles of women among the Iroquois, explaining their fit with the larger culture. Gantowisas means more than simply woman - gantowisas is woman acting in her official capacity as fire-keeping woman, faith-keeping woman, gift-giving woman; leader, counselor, judge; Mother of the People. This is the light in which the reader will find her in Iroquoian Women. Barbara Alice Mann draws upon worthy sources, be they early or modern, oral or written, to present a Native American point of view that insists upon accuracy, not only in raw reporting, but also in analysis. Iroquoian Women is the first book-length study to regard Iroquoian women as central and indispensable to Iroquoian studies.

The Gantowisas

Iroquoian Women

Bruce Elliott Johansen

A comprehensive reference work on the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy), containing over 200 entries covering history, present-day issues such as gambling, pollution, and taxation, and contributions which this important confederacy made to shape general North American culture.

Encyclopedia of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy)

For the first time, an accomplished scholar offers a painstakingly researched examination of the United States' involvement in deliberate disease spreading among native peoples in the military conquest of the West. * Chapters focusing on four charges of deliberate disease spreading among Native American peoples * An extraordinary collection of primary and oral sources, including much that has only recently become available, that helps provide a clearer picture of the Federal campaigns for control of Western territories

The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion

The Tainted Gift

President by Massacre pulls back the curtain of "expansionism," revealing how Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Zachary Taylor massacred Indians to "open" land to slavery and oligarchic fortunes. Provides the first comprehensive review of American Indian policies formulated and carried out by three nineteenth-century United States presidents (Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Zachary Taylor) Reflects the expertise of an American Indian author among the most notable thinkers in contemporary Native American Studies Stands apart from other books on the market by tackling the subject matter from a native perspective

President by Massacre: Indian-Killing for Political Gain

Before invasion, Turtle Island-or North America-was home to vibrant cultures that shared long-standing philosophical precepts. The most important and wide-spread of these was the view of reality as a collaborative binary known as the Twinned Cosmos of Blood and Breath. This binary system was built on the belief that neither half of the cosmos can exist without its twin. Both halves are, therefore, necessary and good. Western anthropologists typically shorthand the Twinned Cosmos as "Sky and Earth" but this erroneously saddles it with Christian baggage and, worse, imposes a hierarchy that puts sky quite literally above earth. None of this Western ideology legitimately applies to traditional Indigenous American thought, which is about equal cooperation and the continual recreation of reality. Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath examines traditional historical concepts of spirituality among North American Indians both at and, to the extent it can be determined, before contact. In doing so, Barbara Alice Mann rescues the authentically indigenous ideas from Western, and especially missionary, interpretations. In addition to early European source material, she uses Indian oral traditions, traced as much as possible to their earliest versions and sources, and Indian records, including pictographs, petroglyphs, bark books, and wampum. Moreover, Mann respects each Indigenous culture as a discrete unit, rather than generalizing them as is often done in Western anthropology. To this end, she collates material in accordance with actual historical, linguistic, and traditional linkages among the groups at hand, with traditions clearly identified by group and, where recorded, by speaker. In this way she provides specialists and non-specialists alike a window into the purportedly lost, and often caricatured, world of Indigenous American thought.

The Twinned Cosmos of Indigenous America

Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath

"Ancient North American cultures shared long-standing philosophical precepts, the most important of which was the Twinned Cosmos of Blood and Breath, as it spun out fractally in pairs from serpent-eagle to dwarf-giant. Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath unravels this philosophical balance using traditional thought"--Provided by publisher.

Barbara Alice Mann

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