Living Indigenous Feminism - by Carolyn Ross Johnston & Terri McKinney Baker

Book Synopsis

Living Indigenous Feminism is a bricolage of historical research and historiography, poetry, interviews, biographies, memoirs, and stories--both traditional and contemporary. This book poses the question of what southern and western history would look like if viewed through the eyes of a diverse sample of Indigenous women. The answer is that these Indigenous women have been "living feminism" in ways that shed new light on these histories, while showing how their lives and visions can offer fresh guidance for turbulent present and the shared future we are making now.

This book features Native women of many different nations, cultures, and regions, including Cherokee, Choctaw, Comanche, Seminole, Seneca, Iroquois, Navajo, Salish and Kootenai, Kiowa, Muscogee, Creek, Yankton Dakota Sioux, Fort Sill Apache, Cheyenne, Red Lake Ojibwe, Ho-Chunk, Seneca, Tonawanda Band, Standing Rock Sioux, Lakota Sioux, Blackfeet, Laguna Pueblo, and San Ildefonso Pueblo. Indigenous women, the authors contend, have always lived a pattern of gender power and balance. Indigenous feminism is traditional, and at the same time, a source of fresh insights about how we can sustain balanced, inclusive, meaningful lives through times of challenge and change.

Although traditional academic scholarship is an individualistic and solitary venture, this approach is relational and organic, with the living Indigenous women who shared their stories with them and with the Indigenous women who lived before them, whom the authors met on the pages of scattered historical records. Their stories suggest powerful new meanings to what "living feminism" can do when we do it together.

Review Quotes

A revealing look at Native American lives.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

This volume keenly brings together collective knowledge, academic research, oral history, poetry and storytelling to explore Indigenous feminism and women's lives through their own voices. By highlighting Wilma Mankiller, LaDonna Harris and others, the book illustrates Indigenous women's experiences with power, with or without the 'feminist' label.--Karla Strand "Ms. Magazine"

About the Author

Carolyn Ross Johnston (Author)
CAROLYN ROSS JOHNSTON is the Elie Wiesel Professor of Humane Letters at Eckerd College where she teaches in the History and American Studies departments. A Pulitzer Prize nominee, she is the author of five books, including Sexual Power: Feminism and Family in America; Cherokee Women in Crisis: Trail of Tears, Civil War, and Allotment, 1838-1907; and Voices of Cherokee Women.

Terri McKinney Baker (Author)
TERRI MCKINNEY BAKER (1948-2022), a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, was a professor of English at Northeastern State University. In addition to coediting Women Who Pioneered Oklahoma, Stories from the WPA Narratives, Baker also published essays in Cultural Survival Quarterly, Journal of the Gilcrease Museum, Oklahoma Humanities and in volumes published by SUNY Press, Rutgers University Press, and Simon & Schuster. She also produced a handful of plays, published poetry, and served as a research consultant for the Gilcrease Institute of American Art.