Search results for ""author barbara alice mann""

The Revolutionary War is ordinarily presented as a conflict exclusively between colonists and the British, fought along the northern Atlantic seacoast. George Washington’s War on Native America recounts the tragic events on the forgotten western front of the American Revolution—a war fought against and ultimately won by Native America. Although history texts often erroneously present the Natives, primarily the Iroquois League and the Ohio Union, as “allies” (or lackeys) of the British, Native America was in fact working from its own agenda: to prevent settlers from invading the Old Northwest. Throughout the war, the unwavering goal of the Revolutionary Army, under George Washington, and its associated settler militias was to break the power of the Iroquois League, which had successfully held off invasion for the preceding two centuries, and the newly formed Ohio Union. To destroy the Natives who stood in the way of land seizure, Washington authorized a series of rampages intended to destroy the League and the Union by starvation. As a result, uncounted thousands of Natives perished from New York and Pennsylvania to Ohio. Barbara Alice Mann tells how, in the wake of the massive assaults, Native America nonetheless won the war in the West and managed to maintain control of the land west and north of the Allegheny–Ohio River systems.

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Stories of the primordial woman who married a bear, appear in matriarchal traditions across the global North from Indigenous North America and Scandinavia to Russia and Korea. In The Woman Who Married the Bear, authors Barbara Alice Mann, a scholar of Indigenous American culture, and Kaarina Kailo, who specializes in the cultures of Northern Europe, join forces to examine these Woman-Bear stories, their common elements, and their meanings in the context of matriarchal culture. The authors reach back 35,000 years to tease out different threads of Indigenous Woman-Bear traditions, using the lens of bear spirituality to uncover the ancient matriarchies found in rock art, caves, ceremonies, rituals, and traditions. Across cultures, in the earliest known traditions, women and bears are shown to collaborate through star configurations and winter cave-dwelling, symbolized by the spring awakening from hibernation followed by the birth of "cubs." By the Bronze Age, however, the story of the Woman-Bear marriage had changed: it had become a hunting tale, refocused on the male hunter. Throughout the book, Mann and Kailo offer interpretations of this earliest known Bear religion in both its original and its later forms. Together, they uncover the maternal cultural symbolism behind the bear marriage and the Original Instructions given by Bear to Woman on sustainable ecology and lifeways free of patriarchy and social stratification.

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Make a Beautiful Way is nothing less than a new way of looking at history—or more correctly, the reestablishment of a very old way. For too long, Euro-American discourse styles, emphasizing elite male privilege and conceptual linearity, have drowned out democratic and woman-centered Native approaches. Even when myopic western linearity is understood to be at work, analysis of Native American history, society, and culture has still been consistently placed in male custody. The recovery of women’s traditions is the overarching theme in this collection of essays that helps reframe Native issues as properly gendered. Paula Gunn Allen looks at Indian lifeways through the many stitches of Indian clothes and the many steps of their powwow fancy dances. Lee Maracle calls for reconstitution of traditional social structures, based on Native American ways of knowing. Kay Givens McGowan identifies the exact sites where female power was weakened through the imposition of European culture, so that we might more effectively strengthen precisely those sites. Finally, Barbara Alice Mann examines how communication between Natives who have federal recognition and those who do not, as well as between Natives east and west of the Mississippi, became dysfunctional, and outlines how to reestablish good relations for the benefit of all.

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