"At the dawn of the twenty-first century, America finds itself on the brink of a new racial consciousness. The old, unquestioned confidence with which individuals can be classified (as embodied, for instance, in previous U.S. census categories) has been eroded. In its place are shifting paradigms and new norms for racial identity. Eva Marie Garroutte examines the changing processes of racial identification and their implications by looking specifically at the case of American Indians." -Amazon.com
"American Indians must negotiate the cultural and psychological legacy of colonialism as they construct coherent, purposive individual and communal narratives. Analysis of the life stories of highly generative members of these groups who have emerged as leaders offers important insights for psychological adaptation in the context of the historical legacy of colonialism. Based on an interpretive analysis of the life stories of two California Indian tribal leaders, we posit a resilient-strength-based approach to narrative identity development to complement and counter the historical trauma discourse. Native American identity emerged as the major source of psychological resilience in the life stories analyzed. This identity manifested and was supported through a commitment to the wellness of tribal community, spiritual practices, and beliefs. For these men, their relationship to their grandmothers was central in molding their identities and serving as a source of resilience throughout their lives. As leaders of a federally unrecognized tribal group, they have adopted a narrative of survivance (Vizenor, 2008), which appears to buffer psychosocial stress and provide a resilient narrative identity. Based on these findings, we theorize an indigenous California Native psychology of resilience." -Lucio Cloud Ramirez & Phillip L.Hammack
Full PDF: http://tps.sagepub.com/content/51/1/112.full.pdf+html "Zapotec farmers in the northern sierra of Oaxaca, Mexico, are highly successful in providing their families with abundant, nutritious food in an ecologically sustainable fashion, although the premises that guide their agricultural practices would be considered erroneous by the standards of most agronomists and botanists in the United States and Europe. In this book, Roberto González convincingly argues that in fact Zapotec agricultural and dietary theories and practices constitute a valid local science, which has had a reciprocally beneficial relationship with European and United States farming and food systems since the sixteenth century.González bases his analysis upon direct participant observation in the farms and fields of a Zapotec village. By using the ethnographic fieldwork approach, he is able to describe and analyze the rich meanings that campesino families attach to their crops, lands, and animals. González also reviews the history of maize, sugarcane, and coffee cultivation in the Zapotec region to show how campesino farmers have intelligently and scientifically adapted their farming practices to local conditions over the course of centuries. By setting his ethnographic study of the Talea de Castro community within a historical world systems perspective, he also skillfully weighs the local impact of national and global currents ranging from Spanish colonialism to the 1910 Mexican Revolution to NAFTA. At the same time, he shows how, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the sustainable practices of "traditional" subsistence agriculture are beginning to replace the failed, unsustainable techniques of modern industrial farming in some parts of the United States and Europe." - Amazon.com
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AuthorLuis Sanakori Ramos Archives
February 2016
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