Skin for Skin: Death and Life for Inuit and Innu (Narrating Native Histories) - Softcover

Sider, Gerald M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822355361 ISBN 13: 9780822355366

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Since the 1960s, the Native peoples of northeastern Canada, both Inuit and Innu, have experienced epidemics of substance abuse, domestic violence, and youth suicide. Seeking to understand these transformations in the capacities of Native communities to resist cultural, economic, and political domination, Gerald M. Sider offers an ethnographic analysis of aboriginal Canadians' changing experiences of historical violence. He relates acts of communal self-destruction to colonial and postcolonial policies and practices, as well as to the end of the fur and sealskin trades. Autonomy and dignity within Native communities have eroded as individuals have been deprived of their livelihoods and treated by the state and corporations as if they were disposable. Yet Native peoples' possession of valuable resources provides them with some income and power to negotiate with state and business interests. Sider's assessment of the health of Native communities in the Canadian province of Labrador is filled with potentially useful findings for Native peoples there and elsewhere. While harrowing, his account also suggests hope, which he finds in the expressiveness and power of Native peoples to struggle for a better tomorrow within and against domination.
 

About this title

About the Author

Gerald M. Sider is Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. His books include Between History and Tomorrow: Making and Breaking Everyday Life in Rural Newfoundland and Living Indian Histories: Lumbee and Tuscarora People in North Carolina, both in second editions.
 

From the Back Cover

Narrating Native Histories is designed to foster a rethinking of the ethical, methodological, and conceptual paradigms that shape work on Native histories and cultures. The editors seek to create a space for effective and ongoing conversations between North and South, Natives and non-Natives, and academics and activists throughout the Americas and the Pacific region. Toward that end, they encourage projects that recognize Native intellectuals, cultural interpreters, and alternative knowledge producers within broader academic and intellectual worlds; projects that decolonize the relationship between orality and textuality; narratives that productively work the tensions between the norms of Native cultures and evidentiary requirements in academic circles; and analyses that contribute to an understanding of Native peoples' relationships with nation-states.

From the Inside Flap

Narrating Native Histories is designed to foster a rethinking of the ethical, methodological, and conceptual paradigms that shape work on Native histories and cultures. The editors seek to create a space for effective and ongoing conversations between North and South, Natives and non-Natives, and academics and activists throughout the Americas and the Pacific region. Toward that end, they encourage projects that recognize Native intellectuals, cultural interpreters, and alternative knowledge producers within broader academic and intellectual worlds; projects that decolonize the relationship between orality and textuality; narratives that productively work the tensions between the norms of Native cultures and evidentiary requirements in academic circles; and analyses that contribute to an understanding of Native peoples' relationships with nation-states.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822355361
• ISBN 13: 9780822355366
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312