Abstract: The Yamasee War was a watershed moment in the history of colonial South Carolina. The trade in captive Native Americans through Charles Town was much lower after the war, but did not stop. Continuities across this rupture included captives coming into possession of the colony through the same mechanisms as before the war: as diplomatic […]

Abstract: This article utilizes digital humanities social network analysis to examine Native women’s roles in overlapping familial and economic social ties revealed in two early Dutch account books. Taken individually these records are difficult to fit into broader analyses; many of the individual Native people who appear in early account books are recorded only once or […]

Abstract: Narratives of the early American frontier precede even the founding of the American nation, and continued to serve as the setting for novelists and, later, filmmakers. This thesis explores the representation and role of women in three distinct eras of narrative, all focusing on narratives written about the 1750-1780s time period. These three eras, when […]

Abstract: This essay is based on my conviction that Australian ethnography’s narrow purview and anthropology’s theoretical limitations need exploring and explaining. While internationally the discipline developed new sites, new theoretical fields and new political ideas in the post-colonial era from around 1970, classicism continued to dominate research in Australia. New forms of Aboriginal social life and […]

Abstract: Explanations for suicide are theorized primarily in terms of the individual, seldom considering the interdependent orientation of Indigenous communities. Drawing on the interpersonal theory of suicide and settler colonial theory, this study addresses Indigenous suicide on two levels: the individual and the collective. Twenty-one interviews were conducted with members of the Cowichan Tribes to understand […]

Excerpt: In contemporary China, it can sometimes seem that the preferred attitude toward this history of imperial expansion is to ignore it and pretend that China was always the same culturally and geographically. There are also some (both inside and outside China, and both inside and outside academic circles) who try to deny the fact that China was built as […]

Excerpt: Indigenous digital games uniquely enact survivance by passing on teachings, telling our stories, and expressing our ways of knowing through varying weavings of code, design, art, music, and audio. Honoring this ongoing work involves recognizing the influence of traditional games as well as the role of the intergenerational kinships among Indigenous game developers and game players. Making and […]

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Abstract: Although the concept of place has most often been used to examine micro-scale locales, recent explications of place-making and place-framing can usefully inform debates on nations, nationalism, and the nation-state. Viewing the nation as a contested, unstable, and relational place enables a pluralist and dynamic understanding of how nation-places are constructed and contested, by whom, […]

Description: Niceness is often assumed to be a superficial concept unworthy of serious analysis. Yet the distinctiveness of Americans has been shaped by values of sociality and likability for which the adjective “nice” became a catchall. In America’s fledgling democracy, niceness was understood to be the indispensable trait of a people who were refreshingly free of […]