A01=Jennifer Bess
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Jennifer Bess
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJK
Category=HBTB
Category=JBSL11
Category=JFSL9
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Category=WQH
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9781646423101
- Weight: 598g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 16 May 2022
- Publisher: University Press of Colorado
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing examines the ways in which the Akimel O’odham (“River People”) and their ancestors, the Huhugam, adapted to economic, political, and environmental constraints imposed by federal Indian policy, the Indian Bureau, and an encroaching settler population in Arizona’s Gila River Valley. Fundamental to O’odham resilience was their connection to their sense of peoplehood and their himdag (“lifeway”), which culminated in the restoration of their water rights and a revitalization of their Indigenous culture.
Author Jennifer Bess examines the Akimel O’odham’s worldview, which links their origins with a responsibility to farm the Gila River Valley and to honor their history of adaptation and obligations as “world-builders”—co-creators of an evermore life-sustaining environment and participants in flexible networks of economic exchange. Bess considers this worldview in context of the Huhugam–Akimel O’odham agricultural economy over more than a thousand years. Drawing directly on Akimel O’odham traditional ecological knowledge, innovations, and interpretive strategies in archives and interviews, Bess shows how the Akimel O’odham engaged in agricultural economy for the sake of their lifeways, collective identity, enduring future, and actualization of the values modeled in their sacred stories.
Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing highlights the values of adaptation, innovation, and co-creation fundamental to Akimel O’odham lifeways and chronicles the contributions the Akimel O’odham have made to American history and to the history of agriculture. The book will be of interest to scholars of Indigenous, American Southwestern, and agricultural history.
Jennifer Bess is assistant professor of peace studies at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has appeared in the Wicazo Sa Review, American Indian Quarterly, Studies in American Indian Literatures, Journal of the Southwest, Western Historical Quarterly, Agricultural History, and Ethnohistory. Her 2015 essay “The Price of Pima Cotton,” published in Western Historical Quarterly, received the James Madison Prize from the Society for History in the Federal Government.
