Indigenous Studies

1st edition available through Interlibrary Loan. A thematic anthology of primary sources for Latin American social and cultural history, the Second Edition reader complements the table of contents of Born in Blood and Fire, Fourth Edition, and draws on newspapers, novels, magazines, and journals--many translated by Chasteen himself--to present compelling narrative accounts of life and society across Latin American history.

Available through Interlibrary Loan. ​​Indigenous history provides a singular perspective on political, social, and economic changes that followed European settlement and the African slave trade in Latin America. Set broadly within a postcolonial theoretical framework and enhanced by anthropology, economics, sociology, and religion, this textbook includes military conflicts and nonviolent resistance, transculturation, labor, political organization, gender, and broad selective accommodation. Uniquely organized into periods of 50 years to facilitate classroom use, it allows students to ground important indigenous historical events and cultural changes within the timeframe of a typical university semester.

Weaving the Past offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary history of Latin America's indigenous women. While the book concentrates on native women in Mesoamerica and the Andes, it covers indigenous people in other parts of South and Central America, including lowland peoples in and beyond Brazil, and Afro-indigenous peoples, such as the Garifuna, of Central America. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, it argues that change, not continuity, has been the norm for indigenous peoples whose resilience in the face of complex and long-term patterns of cultural change is due in no small part to the roles, actions, and agency of women.

Available through Interlibrary Loan. An American journalist recounts the story of the struggle for autonomy by the Huaorani, a nation of 1,300 nomadic Amazonian Indians, whose oil-rich territory has been besieged by hell-bent oil companies, missionaries, unscrupulous bureaucrats, and environmentalists, all claiming to represent the Huaorani's best interests.

This book deals with the perennial tensions between ethnic groups and the modern nation-state and does so from the perspective of a leading Mexican anthropologist with deep and long experience in these matters. As such, it is both a superb introduction to the basic issues and a presentation of the author's own original contributions. It is required reading for anyone wishing to understand the current resurgence of indigenous peoples at this moment in history when conventional wisdom had predicted its demise.

Garifuna live in Central America and the United States. Identified as Black by others and by themselves, they paradoxically also claim indigenous status and rights in Latin America. As Mark Anderson reveals, indigeneity serves as a model for collective rights, while blackness confers a status of cosmopolitanism. Indigeneity and blackness, he concludes, operate as unstable modes through which people both represent themselves and negotiate oppression.

Available through Interlibrary Loan. The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise, Christopher A. Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. Using a combination of participant observation, courtroom ethnography, and archival research, Loperena reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority. The book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways Black dispossession and displacement are carried forth through the conferral of individual rights and freedoms, a prerequisite for resource exploitation under contemporary capitalism.