In this provocative new book, Margaret M. Bruchac, an Indigenous anthropologist, turns the word savage on its head. Savage Kin explores the nature of the relationships between Indigenous informants, such as Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Mohegan), Jesse Cornplanter (Seneca), and George Hunt (Tlingit), and early twentieth-century anthropological collectors, such as Frank Speck, Arthur C. Parker, William N. Fenton, and Franz Boas. This book reconceptualizes the intimate details of encounters with Native interlocutors who by turns inspired, facilitated, and resisted the anthropological enterprise. Like other texts focused on this era, Savage Kin features some of the elite white men credited with salvaging material that might otherwise have been lost. Unlike other texts, this book highlights the intellectual contributions and cultural strategies of unsung Indigenous informants without whom this research could never have taken place. These bicultural partnerships transgressed social divides and blurred the roles of anthropologist/informant, relative/stranger, and collector/collected. Yet these stories were obscured by collecting practices that separated people from objects, objects from communities, and communities from stories. Bruchac’s decolonizing efforts include “reverse ethnography”—painstakingly tracking seemingly unidentifiable objects, misconstrued social relations, unpublished correspondence, and unattributed field notes—to recover this evidence. Those early encounters generated foundational knowledges that still affect Indigenous communities today. Savage Kin also contains unexpected narratives of human and other-than-human encounters—brilliant discoveries, lessons from ancestral spirits, prophetic warnings, powerful gifts, and personal tragedies—that will move Native and non-Native readers alike.
Margaret M. Bruchac is a scholar, writer, and storyteller of Abenaki, English, and Slovak descent. This is her first published book of verse. Some pieces were inspired by historical research for Historic Deerfield, Old Sturbridge Village, the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, and other museums. As a musician, she also performs traditional and contemporary Algonkian Indian songs and stories with her family. Dr. Bruchac is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut at Avery Point. Her academic publications include Indigenous Archaeologies: A Reader in Decolonization, and articles in the Historical Journal of Massachusetts and Museum Anthropology, among other venues. As the 2011-2012 recipient of both a Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship and the Katrin H. Lamon Fellowship, Bruchac is presently in residence at the School for Advanced Research, completing a book manuscript for the University of Arizona Press.
A memoir consisting of episodes in the life of Margaret Benham. Its genesis was in the author's participation in "Save Your Life," a memoir-writing group.
Illuminating the complex relationships between tribal informants and twentieth-century anthropologists such as Boas, Parker, and Fenton, who came to their communities to collect stories and artifacts"--Provided by publisher.
Margaret M. Bruchac is a scholar, writer, and storyteller of Abenaki, English, and Slovak descent. This is her first published book of verse. Some pieces were inspired by historical research for Historic Deerfield, Old Sturbridge Village, the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, and other museums. As a musician, she also performs traditional and contemporary Algonkian Indian songs and stories with her family. Dr. Bruchac is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut at Avery Point. Her academic publications include Indigenous Archaeologies: A Reader in Decolonization, and articles in the Historical Journal of Massachusetts and Museum Anthropology, among other venues. As the 2011-2012 recipient of both a Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship and the Katrin H. Lamon Fellowship, Bruchac is presently in residence at the School for Advanced Research, completing a book manuscript for the University of Arizona Press.
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