Anthropologist Rachel Corr has spent almost two decades periodically conducting fieldwork in Salasaca, an Indigenous parish home to twelve thousand Quichua-speaking people in the Andean province of Tungurahua, Ecuador. Her new book Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is now available from the University of Arizona Press. Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is the first book in the First Peoples publishing initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

How did you get involved in your research community?

My first trip to Ecuador in 1990 was part of a college semester abroad program through the School for International Training. Part of the program involved a weekend “homestay” with an indigenous family, and that was my first time in Salasaca. Toward the end of the semester, each student was required to do a three week independent study project, so I asked the Salasacan family I stayed with if I could return to live with them and learn more about their customs. During those three weeks I learned a little bit of Quichua, I learned about foods and medicinal plants, and I watched as the grandfather of the family, a shaman, diagnosed illness by using a guinea pig. But I was very surprised when I woke up one morning and the mother of the family I lived with was giving birth in the next room. Her husband, mother and five year old daughter were with her, and it all seemed very natural. Unlike people I knew in the U.S., the family did not have the same concerns about children being traumatized by the birth process, and the five year old was not sheltered. I began to think about how different cultural practices of child socialization affected growing up in different cultures. Jim and Linda Belote had written an article about the place of children in Saraguro society in the southern Ecuadorian Andes, and I wanted to study child socialization in Salasaca. When I returned for my senior year of college, I applied for a Fulbright grant to spend a year living in Salasaca to study child socialization.

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We are pleased to announce our initiative’s first books. This spring, our publishing partners will have not one, but five books, that will proudly carry the First Peoples logo. As with the field of Indigenous studies, the books cover a broad and multidisciplinary range of topics. They represent the robust and new directions scholarship in Indigenous studies is taking today.

Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game: At the Center of Ceremony and Identity
By Michael J. Zogry • Available June 2010 • University of North Carolina Press
Based on his work in the field and in the archives, Michael J. Zogry argues that members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation continue to perform selected aspects of their cultural identity by engaging in anetso, a centuries-old Cherokee ball game still played today.

Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation
By Malinda Maynor Lowery • Available April 2010 • University of North Carolina Press
With more than 50,000 enrolled members, North Carolina’s Lumbee Indians are the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River. Malinda Maynor Lowery, a Lumbee herself, describes how, between Reconstruction and the 1950s, the Lumbee crafted and maintained a distinct identity in an era defined by racial segregation in the South and paternalistic policies for Indians throughout the nation.

Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792-1859
By Gray H. Whaley • Available May 2010 • University of North Carolina Press
Modern western Oregon was a crucial site of imperial competition in North America during the formative decades of the United States. In this book, Gray Whaley examines relations among newcomers and between newcomers and Native peoples—focusing on political sovereignty, religion, trade, sexuality, and the land—from initial encounters to Oregon’s statehood.

Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes
By Rachel Corr •  Available February 2010 • University of Arizona Press
In this book Rachel Corr provides a knowledgeable account of the Salasacan religion and rituals and their respective histories. Based on eighteen years of fieldwork in Salasaca and extensive research in Church archives—including never-before-published documents—Corr’s book illuminates how Salasacan culture adapted to Catholic traditions and recentered, reinterpreted, and even reshaped them to serve similarly motivated Salasacan practices.

We are an Indian Nation: A History of the Hualapai People
By Jeffrey P. Shepherd • Available April 2010 • University of Arizona Press
This book focuses on the historical construction of the Hualapai Nation in the face of modern American colonialism. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and participant observation, Jeffrey Shepherd describes how thirteen bands of extended families known as the Pai confronted American colonialism and in the process recast themselves as a modern Indigenous nation.

We will feature each of these titles and their authors in future posts.