scholarly journals Healing Waters and Buffalo Bones: Using Women’s Histories to challenge the Patriarchal Narrative of Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta

Pathways ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
William Wadsworth

Most historical narratives have overlooked women’s roles in and Indigenous peoples’ relationships with the Roman Catholic church, such as that of Lac Ste. Anne, a 19th century Roman Catholic community in Alberta. Lac Ste. Anne was the first permanent Catholic mission west of the Red River settlement and frequently appears in historical documents and missionary histories. Women and Indigenous peoples, however, are scantily mentioned. In contrast to the dominant patriarchal narratives built from decades of male-based stories, I propose that women’s accounts from the settlement illuminate life and relationships between its inhabitants. Drawing on historical sources left by three Sisters of Charity (Grey Nuns), who maintained the chapel and founded the school and hospital in 1859, and oral histories from Victoria Callihoo, a Métis woman who lived in the settlement as a young girl, I will argue that the Catholic Fathers conflated women’s lives at Lac Ste. Anne into one over-simplistic patriarchal narrative. Additionally, when re-examined with a 21st century lens, these stories can inform the anthropological study of women at Lac Ste. Anne including their roles and responsibilities, living conditions, physical and social mobility, and rela­tionships with colonialism.

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
William N. Holden

Political ecology shows how environmental issues can be reframed towards addressing the problems of the socially vulnerable. The environmental identity and social movement thesis of political ecology asserts that environmental issues can generate cross-class and inter-ethnic linkages in an effort to blunt powerful forces. Liberation ecology, a variant of political ecology combined with a counter hegemonic discourse, provides another dimension of political ecology. In the Philippines, mining on indigenous lands has generated opposition from indigenous peoples. By examining how the Roman Catholic Church has aided indigenous peoples in their opposition to mining, examples of the environmental identity and social movement thesis of political ecology and liberation ecology can be gleaned. Liberation theology, an impetus to the church’s commitment to the poor, may be the consummate counter hegemonic discourse.


2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-143
Author(s):  
Live Danbolt Drange

The article discusses challenges and obstacles in creating intercultural dialogue and coexistence across religious and cultural boundaries in a society that is ethnically and culturally multi-dimensional. Bolivian society has always been multicultural and multi-ethnic with a majority of indigenous peoples. The Roman Catholic Church has since colonization officially been dominating religious life and political power while evangelical churches have been growing considerably during the last decades. The majority of indigenous peoples have historically been oppressed by an elite of Spanish descent. In the last few decades there has been an ethnic revitalizing and indigenous representatives have for the first time in history gained positions in the government. They have taken an active part in the rewriting of the Constitution and an education act intending to create a more just and equal society under the slogan “decolonize the state”. A new Constitution and Education Act are establishing that the state is secular and that it guarantees freedom of religion and belief at the same time as it is marked by Andean spirituality. This spirituality and the position of religion in society and in education have been topics of controversy in the process of constructing new legislation. In the discussion the Catholic Church, evangelical Christians and indigenous participants advocating traditional Andean spirituality have been participating. I will look in to possible consequences of this Andeanization especially concerning the children’s religious upbringing.


Author(s):  
Maria Wrede

The article aims at the presentation of the collection of manuscripts, a hardly known collection of historical sources concerning different periods of the history of Poland. It describes in detail individual sets of manuscripts, a kind of guide concerning the inventory of the whole collection available in the Museum (a copy in the National Library of Poland). The most valua­ble, most comprehensive and – in this context – unobvious part of the collection, consisting of the sources for the history of the January Uprising, as well as the collection of literary autographs and royal documents. The objects which are closely related to the history of the Museum are the leg­acy of Father Józef Jarzębowski and manuscripts concerning the history of the Roman-Catholic church, documentation of the Poles’ activities during World War II, minor materials concerning the history of the Polish diaspora. It is only by recognizing the history and context of how the collection had been developed that it can be properly interpreted, individual objects included.  


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-364
Author(s):  
Kristin Norget

This article explores new political practices of the Roman Catholic Church by means of a close critical examination of the beatification of the Martyrs of Cajonos, two indigenous men from the Mexican village of San Francisco Cajonos, Oaxaca, in 2002. The Church’s new strategy to promote an upsurge in canonizations and beatifications forms part of a “war of images,” in Serge Gruzinski’s terms, deployed to maintain apparently peripheral populations within the Church’s central paternalistic fold of social and moral authority and influence, while at the same time as it must be seen to remain open to local cultures and realities. In Oaxaca and elsewhere, this ecclesiastical technique of “emplacement” may be understood as an attempt to engage indigenous-popular religious sensibilities and devotion to sacred images while at the same time implicitly trying to contain them, weaving their distinct local historical threads seamlessly into the fabric of a global Catholic history.


2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 405-424
Author(s):  
Alina Nowicka -Jeżowa

Summary The article tries to outline the position of Piotr Skarga in the Jesuit debates about the legacy of humanist Renaissance. The author argues that Skarga was fully committed to the adaptation of humanist and even medieval ideas into the revitalized post-Tridentine Catholicism. Skarga’s aim was to reformulate the humanist worldview, its idea of man, system of values and political views so that they would fit the doctrine of the Roman Catholic church. In effect, though, it meant supplanting the pluralist and open humanist culture by a construct as solidly Catholic as possible. He sifted through, verified, and re-interpreted the humanist material: as a result the humanist myth of the City of the Sun was eclipsed by reminders of the transience of all earthly goods and pursuits; elements of the Greek and Roman tradition were reconnected with the authoritative Biblical account of world history; and man was reinscribed into the theocentric perspective. Skarga brought back the dogmas of the original sin and sanctifying grace, reiterated the importance of asceticism and self-discipline, redefined the ideas of human dignity and freedom, and, in consequence, came up with a clear-cut, integrist view of the meaning and goal of the good life as well as the proper mission of the citizen and the nation. The polemical edge of Piotr Skarga’s cultural project was aimed both at Protestantism and the Erasmian tendency within the Catholic church. While strongly coloured by the Ignatian spirituality with its insistence on rigorous discipline, a sense of responsibility for the lives of other people and the culture of the community, and a commitment to the heroic ideal of a miles Christi, taking headon the challenges of the flesh, the world, Satan, and the enemies of the patria and the Church, it also went a long way to adapt the Jesuit model to Poland’s socio-cultural conditions and the mentality of its inhabitants.


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