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Dissertation Information for James Riding In

NAME:
- James Riding In

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1991)

ADVISORS:
- Norris Hundley Jr.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Melissa L. Meyer
- Duane Champagne

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: Keepers of Tirawahut's covenant: The development and destruction of Pawnee culture

Abstract: Racial turmoil in the 1860s and 1870s made life increasingly difficult for the Pawnee Indians to live within their ancestral central Plains homeland, where they had resided for hundreds of years. Chronic hunger, coercive assimilation, and enemy raids joined interracial conflict in having an unsettling effect on Pawnee land tenure. Despite the adversities facing them, they attempted to maintain a sacred way of life that, according to their system of beliefs, had been handed down from the first man and woman. Few historians have grasped the pervasiveness of religion in Pawnee culture. Their studies have presented these Indians as savages or creatures of economic considerations without looking beyond the stereotypes and the limitations of single interpretations. Most treatments of Pawnee history focus on the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century or the 1860s and 1870s, when intertribal warfare became a more important dimension of life. Those who discuss the Sioux as being the most disruptive force to enter Pawnee life have underestimated the impact of white American expansion in all of its forms--missionary, assimilation, territorial acquisition and settlement, extension of laws, political control, and domination.

This study focuses on the social and religious roots of Pawnee life and on how interracial and intertribal contacts with the Spanish, French, white Americans, Sioux, Cheyenne, Osage, Kansa, Comanche, and others affected Pawnee economy, land tenure, spirituality, and political freedom and sovereignty. Using historical, ethnographical, and oral sources, it attempts to show that Pawnee experiences occurred within a larger historical setting evolving around the attempts of Europeans and then white Americans to dominate, dispossess, and assimilate Indians in a process that ultimately transformed the landscape of the continent and tribal ways of life. Pawnee culture fell victim to white American expansion in the 1870s.

MPACT Scores for James Riding In

A = 0
C = 1
A+C = 1
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2016-03-30 14:44:41

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Students under James Riding In

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- Myla Thyrza Vicenti Carpio - Arizona State University (2001)