Many historians agree that categories of human division underwent a drastic change due to European New World encounters. The shift from religious divisions to ones based on ethnicity and skin color gradually developed in early modern Europe. Hence, before natives became "red," and Europeans "white" a period existed where the differences between these cultures were utilized in a variety of means to prove similarity and difference. One element signifying difference during the early contact period was that of the beard. Hair as an identifier has a long history: through the middle ages, wildness was conveyed by hair and at times non-Christians were legally required to grow beards. Early in the sixteenth century the beard became a popular fad for white, Christian-European men, a change which some scholars have traced to European contact with beardless Amerindians. Within Europe, the beard came to represent more than otherness. A thick beard conveyed images of health, particularly sexual health; the beard came to represent virility and the beard helped to separate men from women and boys. In this paper I argue that the beard assumed a special significance within early English contacts in the Carolinas and Virginia. I examine the changing meanings of the beard and the English adoption of these meanings. I first examine the European background which helped provide the context for their first permanent colonial settlements in the New World. I next delve into travel accounts, ethnographies and artistic portrayals of the Natives in these colonies to examine how and when both sides evoked facial hair as a signifier of difference. This examination will help reveal English views of Natives during a time when their views regarding the Natives' character could affect the success of English colonial ventures. Finally, I examine why the beard failed as a sign of difference between the region's Amerindians and the English. This failure led to the adoption of other means of distinction specifically that of skin color. Hence the beard served as a first stepping stone towards what would become a fully conceptualized racial theory.

The settlement of the claim to fisheries by Maori is a political milestone. The Sealords Deal (the Deal) as it is commonly known, is the first settlement in New Zealand which extinguishes Maori claims to a particular resource. It affects all iwi and proposes the development of a process for the allocation of benefits. As such it needs to be considered in terms of other post-colonial nations� experiences in the resolution of claims to natural resources. Canada, the United States and Australia provide examples of different attitudes and approaches to the resolution of claims to natural resources by their indigenous populations. A typical history of the resolution of claims to natural resources in post-colonial nations begins with initial European contact, followed by increased numbers of settlers which places pressure on governments and the judiciary to justify the acquisition and exploitation of land and other resources. This leaves the indigenous population landless and welfare dependent. This pattern is reflected in judicial decision-making. In New Zealand, the courts initially acknowledged that the rights of Maori to their lands and other resources, existed unless specifically taken away. When pressure for acquisition of land occurred the courts responded by holding that Maori rights to resources only existed if specifically granted by a court or the legislature. This reversed the original presumption of existence of a right unless taken away. It has only been recently that the New Zealand judiciary has reaccepted the common law doctrine of aboriginal title. This brings New Zealand more in line with Canada and the United States, but New Zealand still has some way to go in acknowledging the doctrine of fiduciary obligation of the Crown/government to Maori. It is also helpful to analyse the changes that have taken place in governments� policies that have enabled the creation of an enviroment in which such a settlement can take place. The Labour governments of 1984 and 1987 began a number of policy initiatives which created a socio-economic climate and responsive enviroment favourable to the settlement of such a claim. Changes are also occurring internationally. Indigenous people�s rights are coming to the fore with the proposed Universal Declaration on Indigenous Rights nearly in place. All this change at a national and international level has only been possible by post-colonial nations acknowledging their past in order to move to the future with confidence. The Sealords Deal is an example of an attempt by Maori and the New Zealand government to make this move forward.

This study is about a Middle Mississippian (A.D. 1150-1350) burial mound site known as Oak Level Mound. Located in the back swamps of Bryan County, Georgia 2.4 km south of the Ogeechee River, the site is situated amongst Live Oak hammocks and Palmettoes. The earthen architecture and material remains found at Oak Level Mound during the fall of 2012 and winter 2013 tell a tale of ancient people whose subsistence included oysters, snail, and nuts. Their daily practices are expressed in burial mounds and utilitarian and/or status goods, such as plain, cord-marked, and complicated-stamped pottery. This study, then, seeks to understand those daily practices taking place at Oak Level Mound between A.D. 1150 and A.D 1350, both locally and regionally.

<p>This dissertation explores the history of the Assemblies of God's Home Missions to American Indians, the development of an American Indian leadership in the denomination and the development of a Pentecostal Indian identity. The history that is told in this work is that of a century-long struggle by American Indian Pentecostals for autonomy, leadership, and recognition within the Assemblies of God. I argue that the AG's efforts to establish indigenous churches in its home missions work to American Indians bore two important and largely unanticipated consequences. The first was that it prompted American Indian Pentecostals to forge a new identity: fully Indian and fully Pentecostal. The second was that it forced white Pentecostals to own up to their belief in the indigenous principle: that God's Spirit fell equally on peoples, without regard to ethnicity or social standing. I focus mainly on giving voice to the Pentecostal Indian actors in this history, in order to fill in the gaps on a group of modern Pentecostal believers that were almost never written about in the histories of the movement.</p><p> I have rooted this work in the history of American religious history, as well as Native American history and the history of American Pentecostalism. The majority of the sources come from the Assemblies of God's archives, chiefly, ministerial files, Pentecostal periodicals, letters, tracts, meeting minutes, and self-published autobiographies.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation is the first historical-cultural exploration of the ways tribal customs made their way into mainstream America. Throughout his career, Cherokee entertainer and political pundit Will Rogers (1879-1935) drew on Cherokee traditions to ameliorate Americans' anxieties over the increase of mass media, the rise of urbanism, and the threatened loss of individuality that came with these changes. This study complicates overly-simplistic assumptions that popular culture uniformly misrepresented and victimized Native peoples during the Progressive Era and Interwar Years. By analyzing the early twentieth century through the work of one of its most influential American Indian participants, this project broadens notions of both American popular political cultures and American Indian identities. Although Rogers and other publicly known Natives like him did not always fit into the public's perception of "the Indian," they did fit into their tribe's artistic and cultural traditions. In this way, Rogers's overlooked work--his live performances on vaudeville and radio, his syndicated journalistic commentary, and his astounding film career--challenges scholarly understandings of the representation and misrepresentation of Native Americans. This study does not merely illuminate the intimate connections between Will Rogers and the Cherokee Nation. It further elucidates the ways American and specific American Indian tribal histories interact with one another. Scholars so often focus on the colonization and usurpation of Indian nations that we overlook the many times indigenous individuals and nations impact the United States in both positive and negative ways. This dissertation, in short, shows that scholars must reconsider essentialized notions of Indianness, turning instead to specific tribal histories and the ways these traditions intermingle with others to affect the whole. / text

This dissertation is a political and environmental history of winter in the colonial Northeast during some of the coldest years of the Little Ice Age. Unlike conventional histories of Atlantic encounters and environmental change, which overwhelmingly concern the warmer half of the year, this dissertation asks how encounters and ecological change functioned in the colder half of the year. Indians and English settlers adapted differently to the vicissitudes of climate change in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, respectively creating winter spaces of power within the varied landscapes of the Maritime Peninsula. This dissertation takes a broad geographical view of the Northeast and incorporates political ecology into the history of early America, stressing the importance of conflicts over access to long-distance travel routes and wild resources, both along the coasts and in the vast uplands. Using captivity narratives, diaries, letters, treaty minutes, and war records, it recovers the ways that winter knowledge and winter technologies both inhibited and facilitated colonialism in the Northeast. Over the course of the seventeenth century, settlers transformed winter ecologies along the coasts and isolated indigenous people in cold conditions. In response, Native Americans increasingly spent longer winters in the interior uplands, dividing themselves into family hunting bands, drawing sustenance and power from wild environments that colonists could not reach, and launching winter raids upon vulnerable English towns. The last quarter of the seventeenth century, one of the coldest periods of the last millennium, presented comparative advantages to mobile Indians, whose snowshoes kept them afloat in times of deep and long lying snows. In the early eighteenth century, however, the English systematically adopted this same indigenous technology to use against Native Americans, disrupting the activities of family hunting bands and raiding parties. English patrols on snowshoes penetrated Native Americans’ winter hunting grounds as never before, and with this winter strategy, colonial leaders attempted to impose a new political ecology in the greater Northeast. Conquest of the northern uplands was incomplete, however, leading to slow and sparse settlement in the interior and leaving ample opportunities for indigenous people to return to their winter lands.

Debates over Mormons in the nineteenth century United States were rarely solely about Mormonism. This dissertation examines the ways in which Utah-oriented discourses of outsider groups influenced political debates at the local, regional, and national levels between 1848 and 1893. As recent studies by Sarah Barringer Gordon and Terryl Givens have shown, the conflicts around which these discourses developed pertained to Mormons and polygamy specifically, but also to broader questions of religious freedom, racial diversity, and the extent to which a community might operate autonomously within the United States. The dissertation expands on decades-old analyses of visual and literary representations of Mormons, considering intertextual dynamics and drawing on a broad source base including non-traditional artifacts such as government reports, objects, maps, and personal writing. My analysis of the changing attitudes towards and representations of Mormon settlement is informed by the growing historiographies of anti-polygamy, anti-Mormonism, and the relationship between gender, family and empire. Examining anti-polygamy discourse through the lens of settler colonialism offers a fresh perspective on the motives, anxieties, and priorities of United States policymakers seeking control of the resources and people of the Great Basin. I will argue that this analytical viewpoint, which has been used primarily in indigenous and subaltern studies, can also be meaningfully applied to a religious sect that was part of the racial majority. Exploring objections to Mormon settlement over time reveals the extent to which Mormon self-fashioning was seen as potentially destabilizing to Anglo-American categories of race and gender—and the profound implications of those categories in political and economic terms. Overall, my analysis reinforces the significance of monogamy as a means of maintaining political control and enforcing racial order. The resolution of the “Mormon Question” in favor of the prevailing kinship model contributed to gendered imperial practices of the United States in the subsequent period of overseas expansion. As a site of confrontation between United States expansionism and distinct social and cultural configurations, the Great Basin was a principal laboratory for the development and testing of issues of United States colonial policy prior to the Spanish-American War.

American Indians suffer disproportionately from mental disorders such as depression and substance abuse. American Indians have lower socioeconomic status than white Americans making them more vulnerable to mental health stressors and disorders, such as depression. Unfortunately, the causal processes and mechanisms producing negative psychological outcomes remain unclear. Despite the disadvantages faced by many American Indians, the Native American community offers cultural norms and values that facilitate treatment of and recovery from mental stressors. The Native American community offers its members an extended social support network as well as healing ceremonies, which could mitigate the effects of depression. In my dissertation, I compare the level of psychological distress between two tribal populations from a study from the Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health (CAIANH) at the University of Colorado at Denver. I use logistic regression to examine the relationship between the psychological distress score and tribal identity. The logistic regression analysis also explores the relationship between self-rated health and socioeconomic attainment. Finally, I compare the outcomes between the Northern Plains tribe and the Southwest tribe. The results suggest that individuals with a strong sense of cultural spirituality have lower psychological distress than individuals who do not have strong cultural spirituality. Also, individuals of the Southwest tribe who spent part of their lives off the reservation or near the reservation experience lower psychological distress compared to those who spent their entire lives on the reservation; in contrast, individuals of the Northern Plains tribe are disadvantaged in terms of mental health if they spent part of their lives off or near the reservations than those who stay on the reservation their whole lives. Members of either the Northern Plains tribe or Southwest tribe who feel socially isolated are very likely to experience severe psychological distress or rate their health poorly. The findings of the study indicate that resiliency factors among the tribes such as cultural-spirituality, reservation community and social support are protective, but the findings also encourage further understanding of mechanisms and utilization of the resources available. / text

This is a slide show of selected photographs from the American Indians and the Old Spanish Trail Ethnographic Study. These photographs serve as supplemental materials for the two reports and offers illustrations of the people, places and resources.

Proposition 209 banned the consideration of race or ethnicity in admission decisions to the University of California (UC). The UC “clarified” their policy in 2008, recognizing that Native Americans enrolled in a federally recognized tribe enjoy a political status that enables them to be offered affirmative action, even when the consideration of race or ethnicity is banned. The Clarification led to a statistically significant surge in the Native American applicant share, acceptance rate, admit share, and enrollment share. Enrollment share increased by 56% from 2008 to 2010 at the UC, even as the three-tiered California system of higher education saw a 40% drop in Native American enrollment. The study also finds that Prop 209 shifted Native American students from the more selective to the less selective campuses. The results suggest that affirmative action is a strong determinant of both the number and the location of Native Americans at the UC.