Editor’s introduction

Abstract

The history of anthropology in North America is very closely intertwined with Native cultures in the United States and Canada. As Polly Strong observes, the first generation of American anthropologists were in a state of “panic” about culture loss, and thus the mad rush to collect anything and everything: word lists, texts, artifacts and art, even human remains. Through much of the 20th century, anthropology in fact rested on an assumed acculturationist foundation: Native cultures were disappearing, both in North America and elsewhere, and this process could be studied, even ameliorated, but fundamentally, indigenous peoples would increasingly adapt and conform to the modern, globalized world. This assumption was not, of course, shared by Native people themselves, who always believed that they maintained a connection with the ancestors, one that may have been frayed, often through deliberate policies of the settler colonial states (language loss being the most obvious example) but that much had remained, and much could be recovered. Indeed, the Iroquois prophecy of the seventh generation, a belief widely held in Indian Country, states that sovereignty and stewardship of the earth would be returned to the seventh generation (after contact with Europeans) of Native people. In the era of climate change, water protectors, and Trump, it is hard not to see the appeal of that prophecy. Native peoples in North America have sought means to express indigeneity and sovereignty in the face of settler colonial society and globalization. The Ho-Chunk (preciously known as Winnebago), a Siouan people traditionally inhabiting much of the upper Midwest, but today confined to Wisconsin, are a good example of the maintenance of cultural practices in the face of settler colonialism. Through warrior societies and other esoteric cultural practices, they have, as Nesper says, been able to maintain cultural and social reproduction. A practice more visible to outsiders is the Powwow, which, as in other Native communities, is the fundamental means not only of maintaining cultural practices, but expressing them to the outside world. Pow-wows are not sacred, and have become commercialized over time: essentially, as a way of including outsiders on their own terms (that