This book presents a sociological analysis of death and bereavement practices of American Indians with oral histories from select tribes describing their practices.

Sociology of Death and the American Indian examines dying, death, disposal, and bereavement practices and applies those concepts to selectAmerican Indian tribes historically and currently, supplemented with oral histories. The focus is that learning about other cultures can enhance the understanding of one’s own culture by comparing traditional and modern societies. Gerry R. Cox addresses the centuries of injustices committed against American Indians that led to a neglect of learning about American Indian cultures and attempts to fill the gaps in knowledge of American Indian practices.

DEATH, AMERICAN STYLE: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF DYING IN AMERICA is the first comprehensive cultural history to explore America’s uneasy relationship with death over the past century.

Review: "More than 100 scholars contributed to this carefully researched, well-organized, informative, and multi-disciplinary source on death studies. Volume 1, "The Presence of Death," examines the cultural, historical, and societal frameworks of death, such as the universal fear of death, spirituality and varioius religions, the legal definition of death, suicide, and capital punishment. Volume 2, "The Response to Death," covers such topics as rites and ceremonies, grief and bereavement, and legal matters after death."--"The Top 20 Reference Titles of the Year," American Libraries, May 2004.

Reminders of death were everywhere in the New World, from the epidemics that devastated Indian populations and the mortality of slaves working the Caribbean sugar cane fields to the unfamiliar diseases that afflicted Europeans in the Chesapeake and West Indies. According to historian Erik R. Seeman, when Indians, Africans, and Europeans encountered one another, they could not ignore the similarities in their approaches to death. All of these groups believed in an afterlife to which the soul or spirit traveled after death. As a result all felt that corpses—the earthly vessels for the soul or spirit—should be treated with respect, and all mourned the dead with commemorative rituals. Seeman argues that deathways facilitated communication among peoples otherwise divided by language and custom. They observed, asked questions about, and sometimes even participated in their counterparts' rituals. At the same time, insofar as New World interactions were largely exploitative, the communication facilitated by parallel deathways was often used to influence or gain advantage over one's rivals. In Virginia, for example, John Smith used his knowledge of Powhatan deathways to impress the local Indians with his abilities as a healer as part of his campaign to demonstrate the superiority of English culture. Likewise, in the 1610-1614 war between Indians and English, the Powhatans mutilated English corpses because they knew this act would horrify their enemies. Told in a series of engrossing narratives, Death in the New World is a landmark study that offers a fresh perspective on the dynamics of cross-cultural encounters and their larger ramifications in the Atlantic world.

Death and the American South is an edited collection of twelve never-before-published essays, featuring leading senior scholars as well as influential up-and-coming historians. The contributors use a variety of methodological approaches for their research and explore different parts of the South and varying themes in history.

Does activism matter? This book answers with a clear "yes." American Indian Ethnic Renewal traces the growth of the American Indian population over the past forty years, when the number of Native Americans grew from fewer than one-half million in 1950 to nearly 2 million in 1990. This quadrupling of the American Indian population cannot be explained by rising birth rates, declining death rates, or immigration. Instead, the growth in the number of American Indians is the result of an increased willingness of Americans to identify themselves as Indians. What is driving this increased ethnic identification? In American Indian Ethnic Renewal, Joane Nagel identifies several historical forces which have converged to create an urban Indian population base, a reservation and urban Indian organizational infrastructure, and a broad cultural climate of ethnic pride and militancy. Central among these forces was federal Indian "Termination" policy which, ironically, was designed to assimilate and de-tribalize Native America. Reactions against Termination were nurtured by the Civil Rights era atmosphere of ethnic pride to become a central focus of the native rights activist movement known as "Red Power." This resurgence of American Indian ethnic pride inspired increased Indian ethnic identification, launched a renaissance in American Indian culture, language, art, and spirituality, and eventually contributed to the replacement of Termination with new federal policies affirming tribal Self- Determination. American Indian Ethnic Renewal offers a general theory of ethnic resurgence which stresses both structure and agency--the role of politics and the importance of collective and individual action--in understanding how ethnic groups revitalize and reinvent themselves. Scholars and students of American Indians, social movements and activism, and recent United States history, as well as the general reader interested in Native American life, will all find this an engaging and informative work.

This book sustains a critical glance at the ways in which we attend to the corpse, tracing a trajectory from encounter toward considering options for disposal: veneered mortuary internment, green burial and its attendant rot, cremation and alkaline hydrolysis, donation and display, and ecological burial. Through tracing the possible futures of the dead that haunt the living, through both the stories that we tell and physical manifestations following the end of life, we expose the workings of aesthetics that shape corpses, as well as the ways in which corpses spill over, resisting aestheticization. This book creates a space for ritualized practices surrounding death: corpse disposal; corpse aesthetics that shape both practices attendant upon and representations of the corpse; and literary, figural, and cultural representations that deploy these practices to tell a story about dead bodies—about their separation from the living, about their disposability, and ultimately about the living who survive the dead, if only for a while. There is an aesthetics of erasure persistently at work on the dead body. It must be quickly hidden from sight to shield us from the certain trauma of our own demise, or so the unspoken argument goes. Experts—scientists, forensic specialists, death-care professionals, and law enforcement—are the only ones qualified to view the dead for any extended period of time. The rest of us, with only brief doses, inoculate ourselves from the materiality of death in complex and highly ritualized ceremonies. Beyond participating in the project of restoring our sense of finitude, we try to make sense of the untouchable, unviewable, haunting, and taboo presence of the corpse itself.

Demographic overview of North American history describing in detail the holocaust that occurred to the Indians.

There is a huge collection of literature relating to death, grief and bereavement, but one aspect that has received relatively little attention is that of death management practices (by which we mean the various ways of managing the circumstances of the death, ritually acknowledging it and sensitively handling the disposal of the body and so on). While ways of disposing of the dead and grief practices have been thought of as based upon individual responses, grief and bereavement practices can be understood not only by looking at psychological and medical frameworks, but also by examining people as part of a complex structure of social arrangements, institutions, structures, and patterns. By examining the social and institutional structures of various groups around the world, we provide an international framework for a better understanding of the study of dying, death, and bereavement. This book highlights the significance of these matters in an international context, reflecting common themes and important differences. It will highlight common themes across diverse cultures and national settings, while also drawing attention to significant differences. If professionals working in the field of death, grief and bereavement are not aware of such differences, their practice can be insensitive, discriminatory and therefore ineffective, if not actually counterproductive. As such, the book provides an invaluable resource for a wide variety of professionals and students, including medicine and health care; social work; counselling and psychotherapy; chaplaincy and pastoral work; and, of course, those involved in the funeral industry. In addition, students of sociology, psychology and anthropology will find much of interest here in terms of appreciating the diversity of ways in which funerals and other death management practices are managed and integrated into social life.