Recent events on Hawai’i’s Big Island represent the latest in a nearly decade-long dispute between Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) and settler colonial forces seeking to build the controversial Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the summit of Mauna Kea. Kanaka Maoli have resisted the construction of TMT on the summit, one of the most sacred sites … More Mauna Kea: "More than just a list of physical attributes."
While filming Barclay’s Tangata Whenua television series in 1972, cameramanKeith Hawke has the camera about 10 meters from the people on the porch,leaving them as free as possible from the paraphernalia of filmmaking.Image: Pacific Films. BY ANGELA MOEWAKA BARNESMāori media researcher It has been more than 25 years since the acclaimed Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay’s … More Remembering the struggles and achievements of Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay.
In Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Place, Alice Te Punga Somerville illustrates how Māori and other Pacific peoples draw their identity not only from land but also from water. She interrogates the relationship between indigeneity, migration, and diaspora, focusing on texts such as poetry, fiction, theater, film, and music, viewed alongside historical instances of … More Writing in Place with Alice Te Punga Somerville
The “I’m a Mormon” campaign appears on a billboard in Times Square in New York City. Image source. BY HOKULANI AIKAUAssociate professor of indigenous and Native Hawaiian politics at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa If you live in New York City, Atlanta, Minneapolis or any of the other 20 cities in which “I’m a … More The "I’m a Mormon" Campaign: Reconfiguring the myth of an American melting pot
In translating and editing the works in The Way of Kinship: An Anthology of Native Siberian Literature (Minnesota 2010), Claude Clayton Smith worked closely with Alexander Vaschenko, another leading scholar in Siberian literature who is based in Moscow. In this second part of our features on this first anthology of Native Siberian literature in English, … More The Way of Kinship, part 2 of 2: The anthology’s early beginnings.
This month, the University of Minnesota Press publishes The Way of Kinship: An Anthology of Native Siberian Literature, the first anthology of Native Siberian literature in English. This stunning volume showcases a diverse body of work—prose fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction—that chronicles ancient Siberian cultures and traditions as well as a dynamic and current … More The Way of Kinship, part 1 of 2: Anthology triggers dialogue between Native American and Native Siberian literary traditions.
Today’s post is by UMP editor Jason Weidemann, who acquires books in sociology, media studies, native studies, anthropology and geography, among other disciplines. ——- In May I had the opportunity to attend the annual Native American and Indigenous Studies meeting in Tucson, Arizona. Always an energetic and passionate gathering, this year’s was even more so … More Looking back on Tucson
Scott Richard Lyons (Ojibwe/Dakota) is assistant professor of English at Syracuse University, where he teaches indigenous and American literatures. He has also taught at Leech Lake Tribal College, the University of North Dakota, and Concordia College, Moorhead. His new book, X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent, is a provocative and deeply personal exploration of contemporary Indian … More Scott Richard Lyons: Making his own x-mark
You’ve probably heard about Arizona’s much-criticized new immigration law, but have you heard what Indigenous scholars are doing about it? Natasha Varner speaks out on the First Peoples blog about unsuccessful efforts to cancel the soon-upcoming Native American and Indigenous Studies Association meeting set to take place in two weeks in Tucson, AZ, and how … More NAISA and SB1070
Historian and author Jean M. O’Brien (Ojibwe) has a very nice Q&A posted at the First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies blog. O’Brien, who is associate professor of history and American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota, is author of Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, which will … More Tracing the persistent myth of Native extinction
