Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 258
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-0-7591-2160-7 • Hardback • September 2016 • $116.00 • (£89.00)
978-0-7591-2162-1 • eBook • September 2016 • $110.00 • (£85.00)
Ronald Loewe is professor of anthropology at California State University at Long Beach. His publications include Maya or Mestizo: Nationalism, Modernity and its Discontents.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Of Sacred Lands and Strip Malls
Part I: Backdrop to a Dispute
Chapter 1 Beginnings: California Indians in Prehistory
Chapter 2 From Mission History to Mission Mania (1869-1928)
Chapter 3 Forty-Niner Culture and the Origin of the American Indian Studies Program
Part II: The Puvungna Land Dispute
Chapter 4 The Political Struggle
Chapter 5 The Legal Conflict
Chapter 6 The Academic Debate
Part III: A History of the Present Moment
Chapter 7 Post-Conflict Puvungna, Repatriation and Reburial
Chapter 8 Moving Forward
Post-Script: Reflections on Puvungna Twenty Years Later.
By Eugene Ruyle, Saundra McMillan, Diana Wilson and Jan Sampson.
Appendices
Loewe provides an insightful analysis of a contest over control of land on his institution’s campus. Owned by the State of California, the land in question is considered common ‘green space’ for students and community members, as well as an iconic feature of the campus. More importantly, a number of Indigenous communities in southern California define the 22-acre expanse as sacred. Puvungna, as they know it, is a burial site and the birthplace of culture hero Chinigchinich. Several Native communities continue to conduct ceremonies there. The sanctity of the space was threatened during the early 1990s when the university moved to allow the commercial development of the site. Eight chapters divided into three parts effectively provide historical and cultural contexts for understanding Puvungna as a sacred site; detail the six-year political, legal, and academic struggle during the 1990s; and offer broader reflections on contests over sacred lands and how to marshal effective political action. Based primarily on archival sources and oral histories, this excellent and substantive work could not be timelier, given ongoing controversies over Native land and resource rights. It also broadens perspectives found in the literature on repatriation and sacred lands….
Summing Up: Highly recommended. General and academic collections.
— Choice Reviews
Loewe’s narrative lands squarely at the intersection where academia meets activism. He adopts the even tone and temper of a patient and observant diarist examining the anatomy of a controversy by dutifully interrogating the biography of a sacred landscape. The book is appealing for its historical depth and breadth, and will also serve as a primer on working within and around grass-roots native groups and organizations. It offers not just hope, but practical, level-headed advice based on real-life experience.
— Kurt W. Russo, Executive Director, Native American Land Conservancy
There are very few extended, well-documented case studies of the kind of conflict represented by the Puvungna case. Clear and understandably organized, this book will be especially relevant reading for CRM and EIA practitioners concerned with current issues in the management of historic places.
— Thomas F. King, Owner, Thomas F. King PhD LLC
An ethnohistorical approach to a multi-faceted social problem… Loewe ably balances the expression of various subgroup interests, positions, and interpretations related to land use and development, and demonstrates the human complexities surrounding what appears to be a simple situation of a public agency deciding to develop a piece of land. However, the overall society’s hegemony fails to acknowledge pre-Columbian indigenous peoples’ ownership, use, and spiritual connection with land.
— Donald D. Pepion, New Mexico State University
Offers a critical history of the California missions, the Gold Rush, the Mission Revival Period, Indian boarding schools, and the development of tourism in California.
Explores the Red Power movement from the takeover of Alcatraz (1969) through the “500 Years of Resistance” movement (1992).
Incorporates eyewitness accounts of the protests and occupations on the CSU Long Beach campus after approval of mini-mall construction on the sacred site of Puvungna.