Beyond Two Worlds: Critical Conversations on Language and Power in Native North America

by James Joseph Buss (Editor), C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa (Editor)

Overview

Beyond Two Worlds brings together scholars of Native history and Native American studies to offer fresh insights into the methodological and conceptual significance of the "two-worlds framework." They address the following questions: Where did the two-worlds framework originate? How has it changed over time? How does it continue to operate in today's world? Most people recognize the language of binaries birthed by the two-worlds trope—savage and civilized, East and West, primitive and modern. For more than four centuries, this lexicon has served as a grammar for settler colonialism. While many scholars have chastised this type of terminology in recent years, the power behind these words persists. With imagination and a critical evaluation of how language, politics, economics, and culture all influence the expectations that we place on one another, the contributors to this volume rethink the two-worlds trope, adding considerably to our understanding of the past and present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438453422
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	07/02/2015
Series:	SUNY series, Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	348
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

James Joseph Buss is Associate Professor of History at Salisbury University and author of Winning the West with Words: Language and Conquest in the Lower Great Lakes. C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa is Assistant Professor of History at Illinois College and author of Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface
Malinda Maynor Lowery

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The World Is Not Enough
James Joseph Buss and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa

Part I: Historical Antecedents

1. “To Live and Die with Them”: Wendat Reactions to “Worldly” Rhetoric in the Land of the Dead
Kathryn Magee Labelle

2. “Willingly Complied and Removed to the Fort”: The Secret History of Competing Anglo-Visions for Virginia’s Southwest
Kristalyn Marie Shefveland

3. The Development of Two Worlds: British and Cherokee Spatial Understandings in the Eighteenth-Century Southeast
Ian D. Chambers

Interlude: Diagramming Worlds
Nancy Shoemaker

Part II: The Real and the Imagined

4. Imagined Worlds and Archival Realities: The Patchwork World of Early Nineteenth-Century Indiana
James Joseph Buss

5. The Indians’ Capital City: Diplomatic Visits, Place, and Two-Worlds Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Washington, DC
C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa

6. Under One Big Tent: Race, Resistance, and Community Building in Two Nineteenth-Century Circus Towns
Sakina M. Hughes

Interlude: Of Two Worlds and Intimate Domains
Susan E. Gray

Part III: Consequences and Implications

7. nahi meehtohseeniwinki: iilinweeyankwi neehi iši meehtohseeniwiyankwi aatotamankwi: To Live Well: Our Language and Our Lives
George Ironstrack

8. Moving in Multiple Worlds: Native Indian Service Employees
Cathleen D. Cahill

Interlude: Working and Between-ness
Brian Hosmer

Part IV: Beyond Two Worlds

9. “born in the opposition”: D’Arcy McNickle, Ethnobiographically
Daniel M. Cobb, Kyle D. Fields, and Joseph Cheatle

10. To Come to a Better Understanding: Complicating the “Two-Worlds” Trope
Sande Garner

Afterword: How Many Worlds?: Place, Power, and Incommensurability
Coll Thrush

Contributor Biographies
Index

Editorial Reviews

"...a valuable contribution to scholars and community members alike." — H-Net Reviews (H-AmIndian)

From the Publisher