kinship systems
Robert Innes, a citizen of the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan, discusses how traditional Cowessess kinship systems and practices continue to structure and inform the individual and collective identities of Cowessess people today, and how those traditional systems and practices are serving...
Authenticity is a puzzling feature of contemporary Indian life. Growing up on an Indian reservation, I rarely encountered challenges to one’s identity as an Indian person. People within the reservation community knew most of the families. If they didn’t know the family connections of a specific...
A key to understanding American Indian nations, and Indigenous Peoples in general, is local community organization. Local groups, as basic building blocks of indigenous nations, play a powerful role in tribal or national consensus building and decision-making. The ways that local indigenous groups...
When making significant change indigenous nations make choices about whether to build on traditions or to adopt new forms of government, economy, culture or community. Many changes are external and often forced upon contemporary Indigenous Peoples. Adapting to competitive markets, or new...
This video gallery serves as a companion piece to "Why Treaties Matter - Self Government in the Dakota and Ojibwe Nations," a travelling exhibit on treaties between Dakota and Ojibwe people and the U.S. It features testimonies from Native nation leaders and citizens about many of the exhibit's main...
A puzzling aspect of the term tribe is its lack of a clear definition. Even the Department of the Interior, the last word on federal recognition, doesn’t have one. Most tribal communities do have an expression in their own language of what their community means to them and to their people. Take...
In this in-depth interview with NNI's Ian Record, federal Indian law and policy scholar David Wilkins discusses the incredible diversity and sophistication of traditional Indigenous governance systems, the profound impacts colonial policies had on those systems, and how Native nations are working...
