The Xicaque, a people of colonial Honduras, confronted Spanish settlers who sought their acculturation through diverse strategies. When Spanish settlers implemented policies such as entrada, reducción or misión, the Xicaque or Xicaque capitanes responded with dissidence and flight. Despite the foundation of a few misiones the Xicaque progressively became avoidant of the Spanish settlers who continued to seek their change by Spanish policy, at the Spanish misiones or at their homelands. This aversion became more pronounced in 1751 when a smallpox epidemic decimated the Xicaque populations at the misiones. Aside from this general distrust that existed between the Spanish and the Xicaque, the Xicaque did engage in trade outside of the previously discussed channels made by Spanish policy. Yet, the overarching pattern of avoidance would characterize Xicaque/Spanish interaction until 1821. Unlike previous scholarship, this study of the Xicaque ethnohistory offers the most complete description of Xicaque culture during the colonial period. Furthermore, it analyzes interaction between the Xicaque and the Spanish since the inception of contact, circa 1676, towards 1821. The broadest range of contact between the Xicaque and the Spanish studied to date. / 1 / Roberto Rivera

Using documentary and ethnographic information, an analogy is drawn between conquest-period (ca. 1722) and contemporary political and religious institutions among the Cora (Nayari) people of the Sierra del Nayar in the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico. Fundamental to these political and religious institutions-then and now-is the idea that the deceased elders of the Cora people continue as active agents in the lives of living Coras, particularly as the seasonal rains. Based on this analogy, an inference is extended from contemporary attitudes of Cora people in the town of Santa Teresa toward the political and religious customs that mediate their relationships with these deceased ancestors, to the possible attitudes of Cora people toward their religious customs at the time of the Spanish conquest of the region. Millenarian fear, an anxiety that is widespread in Santa Teresa as contemporary Coras confront their own failure to adequately continue the customs of their ancestors, is inferred to have been a motivating factor in the Cora's acceptance of Catholic religious customs during the colonial period of their history.

The Yucatán, sixteenth-century Spaniards declared, was tierra enferma (infirmed land) as the destruction of diseases regularly consumed the region. Spaniards, Mayas, Africans, and people of mixed ancestry all fell victim to the cycles of disaster. The shared experiences of disease provided a context for deep lived connections for all. This dissertation examines the beliefs, practices, and relationships related to sickness and healing in the Yucatán from the late-sixteenth century to the late-eighteenth century. At the core of this project are questions about the production and circulation of medical knowledge. How, for instance, did ideas of the natural and supernatural world migrate between supposedly distinct social groups? Why did magical remedies related to the social body whither while unorthodox practices related to the physical body thrive? And how did healing breakdown colonial barriers of ethnicity and status? By exploring matters related to the body, sickness, and healing, this project unveils the complex everyday interactions of a society constantly threatened by disaster. The practices of healing represented the everyday modes of cooperation that operated in direct contrast to the idealized structures of colonial life. Dealing with the intimate relations of healing positions, this work bridges the distinct sub disciplines of cultural and intellectual history. Revealed here are the fundamental limitations of socially-constructed notions of distinction and authority, such as colonial visions of calidad (color), clase (class), and costumbre (culture). The interwoven ideas of status, race, and culture reinforced colonial divisions that tied directly into institutions of exploitation, such as the systems of slavery, tribute, and religious instruction. Nevertheless, my analysis illustrates that on the day-to-day level inhabitants of the Yucatán frequently drew deep connections that cut across idealized divides. Instead of being separated by race, they were united in healing the ills of the colonial experience. And in this manner, the people of the Yucatán created a system of healing that empowered the subjugated, particularly the enslaved and colonized. As such, this project moves from a basic assumption of the commonality of disease to explore the social and intellectual ties of everyday experience in the early-modern Spanish Atlantic World.

Tuberculosis has cast a long shadow on the history of Native-Newcomers relations in the Pacific Northwest. Malicious and deadly, it has dramatically affected the lives of thousands of Aboriginal people and become a permanent part of life in Stó:lõ communities. However, its history, especially the period 1871-1907, has been underrepresented in historical scholarship. Due to perceived scarcity of available quantitative information, scholars in general have paid little attention to tuberculosis, focusing instead on the early contact period, the sanatorium period that began in British Columbia in 1907, or on another disease altogether, usually smallpox. Moreover, when tuberculosis has been studied, it has been approached as a disease within a western bio-medical perspective.<p> In contrast to much of this historiography, this thesis examines tuberculosis more holistically as an illness best understood culturally, as it has been experienced by communities as well as by the individual. Through story and song as well as a thorough reading of familiar government records under a different lens, this thesis engages the perceptions and understandings of both Aboriginal people and Euro-Canadians, patients and government agents, to produce a more balanced, meaningful, and culturally reflexive understanding of the history of tuberculosis. Following a historiographical discussion in the introduction, chapter two explores Stó:lõ oral archival sources to engage Stó:lõ peoples perspective of tuberculosis and illness. These stories and songs, generated by Stó:lõ people themselves, demonstrate the profound influence that tuberculosis has had on Stó:lõ communities throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century. With this new framework in mind, chapter three re-examines the historical record and specifically government documents created by the Department of Indian Affairs and other preceding agencies. This more holistic interpretation of tuberculosis reveals that rather than alleviating the severity and prevalence of tuberculosis in Stó:lõ communities, certain DIA initiatives likely exasperated its affects. By thus addressing the historiographical gap in tuberculosis literature and by generating a more meaningful, balanced, and culturally reflexive analysis of the history of tuberculosis among the Stó:lõ, this thesis contributes to Canadian medical history, the history of Native-Newcomer relations, and the history of the Stó:lõ people.

Tuberculosis has cast a long shadow on the history of Native-Newcomers relations in the Pacific Northwest. Malicious and deadly, it has dramatically affected the lives of thousands of Aboriginal people and become a permanent part of life in Stó:lõ communities. However, its history, especially the period 1871-1907, has been underrepresented in historical scholarship. Due to perceived scarcity of available quantitative information, scholars in general have paid little attention to tuberculosis, focusing instead on the early contact period, the sanatorium period that began in British Columbia in 1907, or on another disease altogether, usually smallpox. Moreover, when tuberculosis has been studied, it has been approached as a disease within a western bio-medical perspective.<p> In contrast to much of this historiography, this thesis examines tuberculosis more holistically as an illness best understood culturally, as it has been experienced by communities as well as by the individual. Through story and song as well as a thorough reading of familiar government records under a different lens, this thesis engages the perceptions and understandings of both Aboriginal people and Euro-Canadians, patients and government agents, to produce a more balanced, meaningful, and culturally reflexive understanding of the history of tuberculosis. Following a historiographical discussion in the introduction, chapter two explores Stó:lõ oral archival sources to engage Stó:lõ peoples perspective of tuberculosis and illness. These stories and songs, generated by Stó:lõ people themselves, demonstrate the profound influence that tuberculosis has had on Stó:lõ communities throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century. With this new framework in mind, chapter three re-examines the historical record and specifically government documents created by the Department of Indian Affairs and other preceding agencies. This more holistic interpretation of tuberculosis reveals that rather than alleviating the severity and prevalence of tuberculosis in Stó:lõ communities, certain DIA initiatives likely exasperated its affects. By thus addressing the historiographical gap in tuberculosis literature and by generating a more meaningful, balanced, and culturally reflexive analysis of the history of tuberculosis among the Stó:lõ, this thesis contributes to Canadian medical history, the history of Native-Newcomer relations, and the history of the Stó:lõ people.

This is a tribute published in the journal Ethnohistory for Dr. Henry F. Dobyns in 2010. This piece was written by one of his former colleagues that he worked with at the Newberry Library in Chicago, IL.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2006. / Title from PDF title page screen. Advisor: Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater; submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (p. 156-165)

The aim of this thesis was to investigate the ethno-history of the Church of God and Saints of Christ and African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. Both religious movements were started by African Americans who passed through slavery. The former started in 1892, and the latter in the 1960s. They claimed an Israelite ancestry, and built their religious movements on what they accepted to be Israelite culture. I found the basic question to be what made these men claim an Israelite identity. I tried to answer this question by examining the cultural conditions in which the founders of the two movements found themselves when they formed the movements. The methodology that I engaged stresses that culture forges people. I found that the deracialization that the founders suffered as slaves led them to appropriate an Israelite identity. In turn, this served to restore the dignity of the African Americans.

This thesis traces changes in economic livelihood among Canadian Parkland Indians during 1800-1930, primarily to analyze the Indians' transition from a relative economic independence to membership in an economically disadvantaged population sector. Concepts of opportunity and constraint are utilized. The growth of settlement in Western Canada in the nineteenth century generated novel economic opportunities for Indians; however, constraints were also imposed, and these gathered strength in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indians are seen in this study as economic agents, who took an active role in seizing opportunities and responding to constraints. It is suggested this approach contrasts with many which assume post-contact Indian peoples to be relatively passive objects of Euro-Canadian or Euro-American action. Economic opportunities discussed are those associated, successively, with equestrian living and bison-hunting on the Plains; the growth of the transport trade, the pemmican trade; adoption of Christianity and aspects of Western civilization; subsistence and commercial agriculture; and, more recently, wage labour. A primary constraint developed out of government policy. A special body of legislation had been created for Indians, and after 1879 a new policy was implemented in the West to exert comprehensive control over numerous sectors of Indian life. It affected livelihood by discouraging economic enterprise and imposing difficulties in obtaining financial credit. It also drastically reduced the scope for initiative on the part of native leaders. When Indians left their home reserves in later years to seek wage labour, their lack of skills and inability to remedy social disadvantages trapped them in a poorly-paid employment. A "culture of poverty" explanation, emphasizing Indians as 'patients', has frequently been advanced to explain Indian poverty. In this study that approach is criticized. It is argued that Indian poverty developed not through failure of Indians to adjust to the growth of settlement. Rather it was a consequence of constraints imposed upon them by (a) government policy and (b) impediments to social mobility. The study has utilized both archival and field data. Archival research was carried out in Winnipeg and Ottawa, and field research at Indian reserves in the eastern Parklands. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The Leco from North of La Paz were considered to have disappeared by the end of the 20th century; however in 1997, two groups of Leco re-emerged independently from each other, one in Larecaja and one in Apolo. In the former the claim was less violent than in the latter, where Quechua peasants share language, culture and kinship, and refuse to recognize the land rights and the identity of their “Indigenous Leco” neighbours. The thesis aims to understand ethnohistorically both resurgences, and tries to go beyond essentialism to understand the heterogeneous melting pot from where the Apoleños come. Apolobamba, because it connects highlands and lowlands, received Andean influences (puquina, aymara and quechua) early on. Its inhabitants, the Chuncho of the Incas then the Spaniards, show hybrid ethnolinguistic and socio-cultural features. The ethnic diversity was reduced in the 18th century Franciscan Missions, where the ethnolinguistic border between an Andean South and the “savages” of the North was drawn at the Tuichi river. The liberal Republican period, with the construction of a national identity, once again shrank regional diversity and increased “Andeanization”. Apolistas and then Apoleños emerged from these interethnic mixes defined more geographically than ethnically. The Leco revival happens in an auspicious national and international context, but the Leco language was still spoken two or three generations ago on the Mapiri's banks. It raises the question of social transformation and continuity: are we dealing with a case of acculturation, ethnogenesis, camouflage or resistance?