Clara Sue Kidwell

Sifters : Native American women's lives

In this edited volume, Theda Perdue, a nationally known expert on Indian history and southern womens history, offers a rich collection of biographical essays on Native American women. From Pocahontas, a Powhatan woman of the seventeenth century, to Ada Deer, the Menominee woman who headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1990s, the essays span four centuries. Each one recounts the experiences of women from vastly different cultural traditions-the hunting and gathering of Kumeyaay culture of Delfina Cuero, the pueblo society of San Ildefonso potter Maria Martinez, and the powerful matrilineal kinship system of Molly Brants Mohawks. Contributors focus on the ways in which different women have fashioned lives that remain firmly rooted in their identity as Native women. Perdues introductory essay ties together the themes running through the biographical sketches, including the cultural factors that have shaped the lives of Native women, particularly economic contributions, kinship, and belief, and the ways in which historical events, especially in United States Indian policy, have engendered change.

Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940

Boarding School Seasons offers a revealing look at the strong emotional history of Indian boarding school experiences in the first half of the twentieth century. At the heart of this book are the hundreds of letters written by parents, children, and school officials at Haskell Institute in Kansas and the Flandreau School in South Dakota. These revealing letters show how profoundly entire families were affected by their experiences. Children, who often attended schools at great distances from their communities, suffered from homesickness, and their parents from loneliness. Parents worried continually about the emotional and physical health and the academic progress of their children. Families clashed repeatedly with school officials over rampant illnesses and deplorable living conditions and devised strategies to circumvent severely limiting visitation rules. Family intimacy was threatened by the schools suppression of traditional languages and Native cultural practices. Although boarding schools were a threat to family life, profound changes occurred in the boarding school experiences as families turned to these institutions for relief during the Depression, when poverty and the loss of traditional seasonal economics proved a greater threat. Boarding School Seasons provides a multifaceted look at the aspirations and struggles of real people.

Comment: Native american women's responses to christianity

This collection of articles brings together the kind of specific information that provides the basis for a synthesis of larger issues, both methodological and substantive, that will allow scholars to compare and contrast the attitudes of missionaries and the responses of Native Americans in ways that show patterns of interaction based on denominational and gender lines. These articles provide an important overview of the varieties of religious experience among Native North American women. They add to the rich store of historical information concerning the impact of Christianity on specific tribes that will contribute to discussions of the complex question of what constitutes native conversion to Christianity. Methodist, Catholic, Russian Orthodox, and Mennonite missionaries attempted to convert Heiltsuk, Carrier, Tlingit, and Hopi people to their own forms of Christianity. The missionaries were both male and female, which led to different strategies of interaction with potential converts, and native men and women thus encountered Christianity in different ways. The articles offer important insights into the impact of Christianity on the lives of native women and on womens responses. It is also important that these articles, focused as they are on native womens responses to Christianity, were brought together originally in a session organized at a meeting of a professional society by two men, Sergei Kan and Michael Harkin. Their role shows us that gender relationships are not the province only of women scholars; they are a crucial part of cultural relationships in any situation of contact between different people. The articles reveal some interesting themes that are not directly related to conversion, the usual focus of such a session. The first theme is a methodological one, the absence of womens voices in the telling of