"This is an edition and translation of an autobiographical account written in the Meskwaki language by a Meskwaki woman in the second decade of the twentieth century. The writer's name was "withheld by agreement", and her identity is not known. She lived on the Meskwaki Settlement in Tama County, Iowa, and was apparently in her late middle age when she wrote the account in 1918. She uses no names of people or places, and the most concrete clue to who she was is her mention of the drum society she joined with her second husband. This has been taken to refer to events of October, 1896, when a drum with the associated Drum Dance worship was brought to the Meswakis by Wisconsin Potawatomis. The Meskwaki historian Charley H. Chuck gave the names of the first Meskwakis to join this drum, but a review of this information with the late Adeline Wanatee established that none of the women he named had life histories that match that of the writer."-- Introduction.

The Meskwaki and Anthropologists illuminates how the University of Chicago?s innovative Action Anthropology program of ethnographic fieldwork affected the Meskwaki Indians of Iowa. From 1948 to 1958, the Meskwaki community near Tama, Iowa, became effectively a testing ground for a new method of practicing anthropology proposed by anthropologists and graduate students at the University of Chicago in response to pressure from the Meskwaki. Action Anthropology, as the program was called, attempted to more evenly distribute the benefits of anthropology by way of anthropologists helping the Native communities they studied. The legacy of Action Anthropology has received limited attention, but even less is known about how the Meskwakis participated in creating it and shaping the way it functioned. Drawing on interviews and extensive archival records, Judith M. Daubenmier tells the story from the viewpoint of the Meskwaki themselves. The Meskwaki alternatively cooperated with, befriended, ignored, prodded, and collided with their scholarly visitors in trying to get them to understand that the values of reciprocity within Meskwaki culture required people to give something if they expected to get something. Daubenmier sheds light on the economic and political impact of the program on the community and how some Meskwaki manipulated the anthropologists and students through their own expectations of reciprocity and gender roles. Giving weight to the opinions, actions, and motivations of the Meskwaki, Daubenmier assesses more fully and appropriately the impact of Action Anthropology on the Meskwaki settlement and explores its legacy outside the settlement?s confines. In so doing, she also encourages further consideration of the ongoing relationships between scholars and Indigenous peoples today.

In 1857, the Meskwaki Nation purchased an eighty-acre parcel of land along the Iowa River. With that modest plot secured as a place to rest and rebuild after centuries of devastation and dispossession, the Meskwaki, or "Red Earth People," began to reclaim their homeland—an effort that Native nations continue to this day in what has recently come to be called the #Landback movement. Red Earth Nation explores the long history of #Landback through the Meskwaki Nation’s story, one of the oldest and clearest examples of direct-purchase Indigenous land reclamation in American history. Spanning Indigenous environmental and political history from the Red Earth People’s creation to the twenty-first century, Red Earth Nation focuses on the Meskwaki Settlement: now comprising more than 8,000 acres, this is sovereign Meskwaki land, not a treaty-created reservation. Currently the largest employer in Tama County, Iowa, the Meskwaki Nation has long used its land ownership and economic clout to resist the forces of colonization and create opportunities for self-determination. But the Meskwaki story is not one of smooth or straightforward progress. Eric Steven Zimmer describes the assaults on tribal sovereignty visited on the Meskwaki Nation by the local, state, and federal governments that surround it. In these instances, the Meskwaki Settlement provided political leverage and an anchor for community cohesion, as generations of Meskwaki deliberately and strategically—though not always successfully—used their collective land ownership to affirm tribal sovereignty and exercise self-determination. Revealing how the Red Earth People have negotiated shifting environmental, economic, and political circumstances to rebuild in the face of incredible pressures, Red Earth Nation shows that with their first, eighty-acre land purchase in the 1850s, Meskwaki leaders initiated a process that is still under way. Indeed, Native nations across the United States have taken up the #Landback cause, marshaling generations of resistance to reframe the history of Indigenous dispossession to explore stories of reclamation and tribal sovereignty.

Provides a critical analysis of the autobiographies of Indian women

Papers of the forty-third Algonquian Conference held at University of Michigan in October 2011. The papers of the Algonquian Conference have long served as the primary source of peer-reviewed scholarship addressing topics related to the languages and societies of Algonquian peoples. Contributions, which are peer-reviewed submissions presented at the annual conference, represent an assortment of humanities and social science disciplines, including archeology, cultural anthropology, history, ethnohistory, linguistics, literary studies, Native studies, social work, film, and countless others. Both theoretical and descriptive approaches are welcomed, and submissions often provide previously unpublished data from historical and contemporary sources, or novel theoretical insights based on firsthand research. The research is commonly interdisciplinary in scope and the papers are filled with contributions presenting fresh research from a broad array of researchers and writers. These papers are essential reading for those interested in Algonquian world views, cultures, history, and languages. They build bridges among a large international group of people who write in different disciplines. Scholars in linguistics, anthropology, history, education, and other fields are brought together in one vital community, thanks to these publications.

The Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork is the most comprehensive reference on linguistic fieldwork on the market bringing together all the reader needs to carry out successful linguistic fieldwork. Based on the experiences of two veteran linguistic fieldworkers and advice from more than a twenty active fieldwork researchers, this handbook provides an encyclopedic review of current publications on linguistic fieldwork and surveys past and present approaches and solutions to problems in the field, and the historical, political, and social variables correlating with fieldwork in different areas of the world. The discussion of the ethical dimensions of fieldwork, as well as what constitutes the “typical” linguistic fieldwork setting or consultant is explored from multiple perspectives relevant to fieldwork on every continent. Included is information omitted in most other texts on the subject such as the collection, representation, management, and methods of extracting grammatical information from discourse and conversational data as well as the relationship between questionnaire-based elicitation, text-based elicitation, and philology, and the need for combinations of these methods. The book is useful before, during and after linguistic field trips since it provides extensive practical macro and micro organization and planning fieldwork tips as well as a handy sketch of major typological features for use in linguistic analysis. Comprehensive references are provided at the end of each chapter as resources relevant to the reader's particular interests.

Published In cooperation with the American Indian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington.