Standing Up to Colonial Power
The Lives of Henry Roe and Elizabeth Bender Cloud
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Standing Up to Colonial Power focuses on the lives, activism, and intellectual contributions of Henry Cloud (1884–1950), a Ho-Chunk, and Elizabeth Bender Cloud (1887–1965), an Ojibwe, both of whom grew up amid settler colonialism that attempted to break their connection to Native land, treaty rights, and tribal identities. Mastering ways of behaving and speaking in different social settings and to divergent audiences, including other Natives, white missionaries, and Bureau of Indian Affairs officials, Elizabeth and Henry relied on flexible and fluid notions of gender, identity, culture, community, and belonging as they traveled Indian Country and within white environments to fight for Native rights.
Elizabeth fought against termination as part of her role in the National Congress of American Indians and General Federation of Women’s Clubs, while Henry was one of the most important Native policy makers of the early twentieth century. He documented the horrible abuse within the federal boarding schools and co-wrote the Meriam Report of 1928, which laid the foundation for the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Together they ran an early college preparatory Christian high school, the American Indian Institute.
Standing Up to Colonial Power shows how the Clouds combined Native warrior and modern identities as a creative strategy to challenge settler colonialism, to become full members of the U.S. nation-state, and to fight for tribal sovereignty. Renya K. Ramirez uses her dual position as a scholar and as the granddaughter of Elizabeth and Henry Cloud to weave together this ethnography and family-tribal history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ramirez (Gender, Belonging, and Native American Women) employs her professional skills as an anthropologist to tell the story of her grandparents, Native American activists whose work helped pave the way for the 1960s Red Power movement, with the aim of decolonizing the family legacy. Ramirez's grandfather Henry, a member of the Ho-Chunk tribe of what is now Wisconsin who was adopted by a white Christian family after his own died in a flu epidemic, gained national attention for his work on the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and for founding a Native American school that embraced rather than eradicated Native traditions. His wife, Elizabeth, worked as a partner in the school and as an activist, and also received the 1950 American Mother of the Year Award. Ramirez takes an explicitly decolonizing perspective; she declines to use the portion of Henry's name that he voluntarily took from his adoptive family and labels Elizabeth's conception of parenting problematic because it was influenced by settler-colonial culture. The academic anthropological analysis meshes somewhat uneasily with the personal stories that movingly convey similar ideas. Given this style, this work is best suited for scholarly readers, but Ramirez tells a valuable story of indigenous resistance and a family legacy of activism.
