HS sterilization procedures drastically af- fected all aspects of Native American life.

. Both were having appendectomies when the doctors sterilized them without their knowledge or co

"childishly confining their im-provements, as if the crop would eat itself"

men and women often willingly helped one another. Men assisted in sev-eral agricultural chores including the arduous task of clearing fields and harvesting the crops

but their concern with balance made hierarchy, which often serves to oppress women, untenable.

male

favorite female children among the Piegan often led i n child-hood games, played boys' sports, and took for them-selves the names of great warriors. Moreover, some indulged in sex play early in life

"masculine."

As Navajos see matters, her identity as someone other than Navajo is simply not an issue.

if it suited her, she would comply.

are called mother.

“complementary,”

experienced boarding schools and were sent away for long periods.

łk'iníbaa had at least three husbands, so some of the descendants do not claim Dághá Chíí Bik'is as their grandfather. Her older sister also had several hus-bands. This experience appears to have been common in this period and may reflect ruptures created when men left to seek wage labor or died from epidemic diseases.

more fully the importance of oral tradition and affirmed for myself the importance of our cultural values.

the history of Indian education has meant a loss of tra-ditional knowledge and Native languages and little if any access to our own histories.

-not to become the validators or verifiers of stories

they always say the Indians are ruthless killers and that they massacred white people. The white people are just as bad, even worse. You never hear about the things that happened to our people because it was never written in the history books. They say it is always the Indians who are at fault

d fulfilled her obligations and that these stories would not be forgotten

ead that oral history is contained within oral tradition. For the Dakota, "oral tradition" refers to the way in which information is passed on rather than the length of time something has been told.

er grandmother, in particular, had carried vivid, painful memories of those traumatic times. Over time, those painful memories of my great-great- grandmother became the memories of my grandmother and, then, they became my memories

f kinship responsibility, a responsibility that relays a culture, an identity, and a sense of belonging essential to my life. It is through the stories of my grandmother, my grandmother's grandmother, and my grandmother's grandmother's grandmother and their lives that I learned what it means to be a Dakota woman, and the responsibility, pain, and pride associated with such a role. These stories in our oral tradition, then, must be appreciated by historians not simply for the illumination they bring to the broader historical picture but also as an essential component in the s

“interlocking hierarchies” of gov-ernance.

The fl edgling colony of Plymouth “pretended” to claim preemptive rights to the entire Wampanaog country, through their al-liance with Ousamequin; the legitimacy and bounds of their “patent” rested in part on their treaty with him

kinship through pronouns like “my,” “our,” and “his.” Yet these terms do not denote possession, but rather evoke responsibilities and shared histories that bind people to each other and the land.

“has falsely educated New En-glanders” and Americans “for generations,” engendering a mythological history in which the English, and their American descendants, “replace” Indians in the land.

These newcomers also carried a vision that “Englishmen” would replace the Indigenous people, including women planters, as the rightful inhabitants of this land

“friendly entertain-ment”

remember thinking that the confer- ences seemed very assimilationist. I

the early studies on Native women were anthropological, and because Medicine was an anthropologist, although she understood the discipline through the lens of a Nativ

Narratives are helpful only in the absence of grades

“measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning”

“If you have one eye on how close you are to achieving your goal, that leaves only one eye for your task.”

Research on the effects of grading has slowed down in the last couple of decades, but the studies that are still being done reinforce the earlier findings

Suddenly all the joy was taken away.