Thomas Buckley 
Standing Ground [PDF ebook] 
Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850–1990

This colorful, richly textured account of spiritual training and practice within an American Indian social network emphasizes narrative over analysis. Thomas Buckley’s foregrounding of Yurok narratives creates one major level of dialogue in an innovative ethnography that features dialogue as its central theoretical trope. Buckley places himself in conversation with contemporary Yurok friends and elders, with written texts, and with twentieth-century anthropology as well. He describes Yurok Indian spirituality as ‘a significant field in which individual and society meet in dialogue—cooperating, resisting, negotiating, changing each other in manifold ways. ‘Culture, ‘ here, is not a thing but a process, an emergence through time.’

Table of Content

Acknowledgments

Introduction


PART ONE: CONTEXTS

1. The Yurok Reservation

2. Double Helix

3. Native Authors


PART TWO: TESTIMONY

4. Seeing with Their Own Eyes

5. Doctors

6. The GO-Road


PART THREE: UNDERSTANDINGS

7. The One Who Flies All around the World

8. The World

9. Melancholy

10. The Shaker Church

11. Jump Dance


Notes

References

Acknowledgments of Permissions

Index

About the author

Thomas Buckley is an independent scholar and writer living in Maine. He previously taught anthropology and American Indian studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and coedited Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation (California, 1988).