scholarly journals Racism as Delusion: A Buddhist Perspective

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 602
Author(s):  
David R. Loy
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Leslie Marmon Silko ◽  
World War ◽  
White People ◽  
Poor Whites

The powerful novel Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko combines several uncomfortable truths from the perspective of a young Native American who has returned home after World War II: the theft of Native American land, the manipulations that set poor whites against poor Indians (among others) and the effects of these lies on the hearts of white people, who tried and still try to fill up their hollowness with money, technology and patriotic war. However, as Silko emphasizes, the lies do not work. Not only have we white folk been fooling ourselves, but we also know that we have been fooling ourselves, and the consequences of our self-deceptions continue to haunt all of us. This essay is an attempt to say more about how that collective delusion functions—in particular, to understand the emptiness that patriotism never quite fills up, the hollowness that wealth and consumerism cannot glut. In order to do this, I will offer a (not “the”) Buddhist perspective, so we begin with some basic Buddhist teachings, which are quite different from the Abrahamic (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) traditions more familiar to most of us.

Who Can Say They Are Apathetic and Listless Now?

2019 ◽  
pp. 42-67
Author(s):  
Douglas K. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
The United States ◽  
American People ◽  
World War ◽  
Standards Of Living ◽  
And Migration ◽  
War Production ◽  
Migration Experiences

Roughly 65,000 Native American people enlisted for overseas service or contributed domestically to war production industries during World War II. Expansive off-reservation work and migration experiences created a historical precedent and network for subsequent waves of Native peoples who moved to cities for new opportunities and better standards of living after making significant contributions to the United States’ victory in World War II. Meanwhile, paying attention to Native American patriotism and urban labor, the federal government began envisioning an urban relocation program.

Cavaliers and Crackers, Tara and Tobacco Road: The Myth of a Two-Class White South

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 505-517
Author(s):  
Emily Wright
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Thomas Nelson Page ◽  
Poor White

In Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain, eminent southernist Y(stet)Fred Hobson argues that since the early 19th century, southern discourse has been dominated by a desire to explain the South to a nation critical of its practices. This “rage to explain” was particularly apparent in the era known as the Southern Renaissance — the period roughly between World War I and World War II that saw a flowering of southern letters and intellectual life. During this period, southern poets, novelists, essayists, historians, and sociologists participated in a comprehensive enactment of the southern “rage to explain” the South, both to itself and to the rest of the world. Within this outbreak of explanation, a significant pattern emerges: a pattern of resistance to what I shall call the myth of a two-class white South.Throughout American history, northerners and southerners alike have colluded to create the impression that the antebellum white South consisted of only two classes: aristocratic planters on one extreme and debased poor whites on the other. This impression was initiated in the 18th century, when William Byrd's histories of the dividing line introduced the image of the poor white in the form of the laughable “Lubberlander.” The stereotype of the comic and/or degraded poor white can be traced from Byrd through George Washington Harris's tales of Sut Lovingood (1867) to William Alexander Percy's diatribes against poor whites in Lantern on the Levee (1941) and William Faulkner's unflattering portrayal of the Snopeses (1940–59). Meanwhile, the images of the courteous, kindly planter and of the plantation as pastoral idyll can be traced from John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832) through the postbellum plantation fiction of Thomas Nelson Page to Stark Young's Civil War romance, So Red the Rose (1934).

Women’s contributions to early American Indian linguistics

2020 ◽  
pp. 345-366
Author(s):  
Raina Heaton ◽  
Eve Koller ◽  
Lyle Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Language Documentation ◽  
World War ◽  
Native American Women ◽  
Native American Languages ◽  
Early American

This chapter focuses on women who contributed significantly to American Indian linguistics before World War II. It highlights the lives, work, and impact of the influential scholars Mary Haas, Gladys Reichard, and Lucy Freeland, as well as the contributions of Native American women such as Ella Deloria and Flora Zuni in this period of early linguistic work on Native American languages. The personal and professional histories of these women and the challenges they faced in male-dominated academia are discussed. Despite those challenges, they contributed significantly to the discipline through their fieldwork on Native American languages, their commitment to language documentation and to their students, and the knowledge they passed on to subsequent generations. Their perseverance at a turning point in American linguistics advanced the role of women and has had a lasting effect on the climate of American scholarship.

scholarly journals “Things which don’t shift and grow are dead things”: Revisiting Betonie’s Waste-Lands in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony

2014 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Anna M. Brígido-Corachán
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
Historical Episode ◽  
World Economic ◽  
Political Background ◽  
Organic Intellectual ◽  
Alternative Solutions ◽  
Epistemological Dimension

This article explores the socio-political background that led to widespread Native American urban relocation in the period following World War II – a historical episode which is featured in Leslie Marmon Silko’s acclaimed novel Ceremony (1977). Through an analysis of the recycling, reinterpreting practices carried out by one of Ceremony’s memorable supporting characters, Navajo healer Betonie, Silko’s political aim to interrogate the state of things and to re-value Native traditions in a context of ongoing relations of coloniality is made most clear. In Silko’s novel, Betonie acts as an organic intellectual who is able to identify and challenge the 1950s neocolonial structure that forced Native American communities to either embrace hegemonic practices and lifestyles or else be condemned to cultural reification and abject poverty. Through his waste-collecting and recycling activities, Betonie develops alternative solutions that go beyond a merely spiritual or epistemological dimension of life and materially intervene in the social text. The margins of 1950s urban sprawl functioned as repositories of indigenous cultural and intellectual capital that was being consciously, actively transformed by Native agents such as him. Thus, through Ceremony’s medicine man, Leslie Silko criticizes disempowering attitudes of victimhood and Native self-shame while vindicating indigenous historical territories and unconventional political strategies. She also anticipates the liminal practices of material and cultural recycling we see in countless Western cities today, in the aftermath of the most recent world economic crisis.

Marilou Awiakta

2020 ◽  
pp. 299-302
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Air Force ◽  
World War ◽  
Her Family ◽  
University Of Tennessee ◽  
Oak Ridge ◽  
Us Air Force ◽  
The Us ◽  
The University

Poet, storyteller, and essayist Marilou Awiakta explores the intersection of traditional and modern Appalachian life by blending her Appalachian and Cherokee heritages with the legacy of post–World War II nuclear energy research in her hometown of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Born Marilou Bonham in Knoxville to a family with Scots-Irish and Native American roots reaching back to the 1730s, Awiakta (her middle name) was raised with an awareness of social and environmental responsibility. When Awiakta was nine, her family moved to Oak Ridge, where her father agreed to work for two years in the nuclear facility, known locally as “the secret city.” After graduating from the University of Tennessee in 1958, Awiakta moved to France with her husband, a physician with the US Air Force. While there, she worked as a liaison and translator for the base....

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