Decolonizing Tribal Histories

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Decolonizing Tribal Histories

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Titles	Decolonizing Tribal Histories:
Name	Winona Lu-Ann Stevenson
Type of Resource	text
Genre	Thesis
Abstract	Historians of the Native American past are now considering how Indigenous oral histories can broaden our understanding of events in the distant past. Even the most intrepid, however, still grapple with questions concerning the nature and quality of oral history, oral history methodologies, and how oral histories can be textually represented without compromising scholarly or tribal integrity. For most historians, the major prohibiting factor is that Native American oral histories do not neatly conform to modern Western imperatives. Trained in the Western mode, historians are confronted with content and form that often bear little resemblance to what they know and work with. Unfamiliarity breeds suspicion which results in rejection, omission by avoidance, or superficiality. Historians fear what they do not understand and so they ‘other’ Indigenous voices right out of their own histories. The present study provides a comprehensive overview of academic debates concerning the nature, value, reliability, and forms of oral histories and how recent intellectual innovations from the New History movement, New Historicism, postcolonial studies and postmodernism have initiated a breakdown of traditional disciplinary barriers which promise inroads for historical traditions outside the conventional mold. This study demonstrates that long before these internal challenges emerged Native American writers have been writing in the oral tradition and have been consistently calling for a New Indian History based on Indigenous oral traditions. A case study of nêhiyawak, Plains Cree, historical traditions, will further demonstrate that relearning history from within a tribal-specific framework not only provides insight on Indigenous philosophies, methodologies, and aesthetic narrative forms, it also provides a foundation for the writing of New Indian Histories. On the bases that the silencing, marginalization, and patronizing of Indigenous voices, in the writing of Indigenous histories, epitomizes intellectual colonialism, this study asserts that the decolonization of Indigenous histories must begin from within a tribal context. This study further asserts that the transdisciplinary approach of Native American Studies provides the most appropriate and fertile field for the development of an Indigenous oral traditions-based New Indian History.
URL	https://search.proquest.com/pqdtglobal/docview/304598181/fulltextPDF/E5BF5A2284A24E76PQ/33?accountid=14739
Form	text
Access Condition	Responsibility regarding questions of copyright that may arise in the use of any images is assumed by the researcher
Subject Hierarchical Geographic	North America--Canada------
Subject Local Name	--Oral history--Saskatoon--Saskatchewan--Tribal--Cree--------