the role of native american women in cultural continuity and ...

1. The Role of Native American Women in Cultural Continuity and TransitionBea Medicine Native women traditionally responsible for: Socialization of Children Mediation with Whites � Cultural Broker/Cultural Mediator Evaluators of language

3. Brokers were defined less by what they did than by who they were � gained identities through long service in multiple contacts Broker�s experience liminal � effects could always be compromised In anth lit, brokerage represented as either as: A) a creative act that enhances identity (Handsome Lake, Seneca) or a marginalizing process that alienates broker from cultural roots Women have often been especially effective � and controversial � brokers For Native women, brokerage often translates only to becoming wives or concubines. Ramifications today?

6. Cultural Broker: Ella Deloria http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/na_010100_deloriaella.htm

7. Contemporary Native Artistic Responses The story of Native women and their relation to power and authority between precolonial and postcolonial advance of patriarchy(p.307). For native peoples and particularly native women, popular stereotypes of the Indian princess or squaw drudge are non-recouperable sites of early Native womanhood. Like �Sapphire� ir �Brown Sugar� these Indian female images are ciphers and cultural inventions that cannot be reappropriated by native women without complicity in or service to their enterprise. (p. 313) What� would Native women�s history look like if Native Americans had been able to circulate and safeguard their written histories? (p. 315)

8. Lori Blondeau, performance artist COSMOSQUAW and The Lonely Surfer Squaw " With tongue-in-cheek humour, Blondeau captures the word that wounds and redeploys it in COSMOSQUAW and The Lonely Surfer Squaw, making of it something startlingly subversive, compulsively entertaining and highly political. Fighting stereotypes with stereotypes, however, can be risky business, and her invented personas often spark heated debates about the need for positive images�as opposed to the use of subversive repetition�to reroute and reconfigure inherited patterns of thinking in contemporary culture.� Lynne Bell, Canadian Art Winter 2004 http://www.canadianart.ca/articles/Articles_Details.cfm?Ref_num=259

9. Seeking the SpiritBea Medicine & Liucija Baskauskas1999 What qualities are necessary for a ritual to be ethnically "authentic"? Dr. Bea Medicine, a Native American anthropologist and her ...�all�� Lithuanian colleague, Dr. Liucija Baskauskas explore this issue as they visit a group of Russians who have met for their annual two week Pow Wow in an isolated wooded area outside of St. Petersburg. The Russians, predominantly couples with young children, tell us they initially became interested in Native American culture via Hollywood films. Back on a reservation in South Dakota, upon viewing a video of the dances and elaborate costumes of the Russians, a Lakota woman good-naturedly jokes, �They must've seen A Man Called Horse". We see at close range the careful attention to detail the Russians have invested in the recreation of the look and the feel of Native America ritual and life. When asked why they are doing this they tell us it is for their children. They are seeking the "right way to live", in order to impart authentic Native American values to their offspring and to escape the cycle of consumerism and the negative aspects that they see in their own culture.���