Creat membership Creat membership
Sign in

Forgot password?

Confirm
  • Forgot password?
    Sign Up
  • Confirm
    Sign In
home > search

Now showing items 49 - 64 of 156

  • Social Justice in a Diverse Societyby Tom R. Tyler; Robert J. Boeckman; Heather J. Smith; Yuen J. Huo

    Review by: David De Cremer  

    Download Collect
  • Social Justice in a Diverse Societyby Tom R. Tyler; Robert J. Boeckmann; Heather J. Smith; Yuen J. Huo

    Review by: Robert Folger  

    Download Collect
  • Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia – Edited by Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman

    MARGARET PAXSON  

    Download Collect
  • The Eclogues and Cynegetica of Nemesianusby Heather J. Williams

    Review by: Raoul Verdière  

    Download Collect
  • Palmer, R. Heather, Donabedian, Avedis, and Povar, Gail J. Striving for Quality in Health Care

    Larson, Elaine  

    Download Collect
  • Palmer, R. Heather, Donabedian, Avedis, and Povar, Gail J. Striving for Quality in Health Care

    Larson   Elaine  

    Download Collect
  • Goths and Romans, 332-489by P. J. Heather;The Goths in the Fourth Centuryby P. J. Heather; J. Matthews

    Review by: J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz  

    Download Collect
  • Commentary on “Open inguinal hernia repair in women: is mesh necessary?” by N. M. Thairu, B. P. Heather, J. J. Earnshaw

    R. Bendavid  

    Download Collect
  • Emerging perspectives in health communication: Meaning, culture, and power - Edited by Heather M. Zoller & Mohan J. Dutta

    Gretchen Norling Holmes  

    No abstract is available for this article.
    Download Collect
  • Book Review: Mehmet Ali Dogan, Heather J. Sharkey (eds.) American Missionaries and the Middle East: Foundational Encounters

    Singh, D. E.  

    Download Collect
  • Commentary on 鈥淥pen inguinal hernia repair in women: is mesh necessary?”by N. M. Thairu, B. P. Heather, J. J. Earnshaw

    R. Bendavid  

    Download Collect
  • Tribal GIS: Supporting Native American Decision Making. Anne Taylor, David Gadsden, Joseph J. Kerski, and Heather Warren eds.

    Rundstrom   Robert  

    Redlands, CA: Esri, 2012. xi and 161 pp., maps, photos, diagrams, references. $19.95 paper (ISBN 978-1-58948-320-0). Most readers of this journal will know that the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) is the largest purveyor of geospatial technologies and related commodities in the world. With over $700 million in annual earnings from its geographic information systems (GIS) operations alone, ESRI products currently hold over 40 percent of the global market share. One online GIS portal estimates that 70 percent of GIS users worldwide use ESRI products. Most U.S. federal agencies are its customers, including the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Since 2002, the BIA has been a part of an ESRI Enterprise Licensing Agreement (ELA) that essentially made GIS operations at the BIA an ESRI asset. Because the vast majority of approximately 564 North American Indian tribal governments are comprador governments imposed by BIA lawyers working under authority of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, their representatives are subject to BIA approval. GIS managers in tribal government serve the BIA–ESRI nexus as well. It is into this internal colonial structure that the development and implementation of tribal GIS has occurred. ESRI has promoted GIS use among tribal governments for more than twenty-five years, initially through sessions at periodic user conferences. By 2005, 232 tribal governments were using ESRI products. But that was not enough apparently, so their in-house publishing organ, ESRI Press, produced a twenty-one-page promotional booklet in 2009. Tribal GIS represents their latest effort to bring still more tribal governments into the fold. What drives ESRI's interest in marketing to Indians? What are the real costs and benefits to Indian societies? Unfortunately, this book is pure promotion, as self-aggrandizing as it is an overture to representatives of tribal governments yet to implement GIS, so no straight answers to these questions are provided. Thirty-three entries representing nineteen different Indian societies and four tribal colleges or other schools are spread among ten short chapters. Each multiauthored entry, just a few pages in length, describes a project in resource management, environmental protection, transportation, cultural and historical preservation, economic development, health, education, or agriculture. Most are drawn from the Pacific Northwest, the northern Plains, or the southwestern United States. Each contribution begins with a basic description of the reservation or region, its resident population, and some political history, including treaties and land dispossession. These brief introductory paragraphs are somewhat useful for those completely unfamiliar with Indian Country but who might find themselves working here one day. A lot of the examples demonstrate the interest of tribal governments in making maps, however, more than an interest in the full capabilities of GIS per se. In many cases, readers will not understand how tribal GIS operations differ significantly from those in the non-Indian world. In a few, the difference is immediately apparent. For example, GIS, remote sensing, and geophysical technologies help the Florida Seminole to conduct noninvasive fieldwork and avoid materially disturbing most of the 130,000 archeological sites of importance to them across six states. It is not surprising to see how little the academic debates and research on subjects like critical GIS or community- or public-participation GIS matter in a corporate publication like this. Still, one would think ESRI could profit from promotion of such ongoing work as well. Apparently that was not to be, as these editor-managers of “tribal,” nonprofit, education, and federal marketing divisions at company headquarters selected examples to help push ESRI's goal of implanting enterprise-wide GIS within tribal governments. Consequently, many entries openly extol the virtues of enterprise GIS to the point of embarrassment. For example, among the Siletz, Grand Ronde, Florida Seminole, Ysleta del Sur, Agua Caliente Cahuilla, Eastern Cherokee, and Chickasaw, we read of the need to remove barriers to geodatabase access in the interests of managing lands, waters, and peoples as tribal “assets” controlled by tribal government. It is always nice to see enthusiasm and pretty color maps, but the full implications of signing an ELA, much like the implications of signing a nineteenth-century treaty with the federal government, are unexplained. Readers are left wondering whether ESRI president Jack Dangermond is just a sympathetic white do-gooder, a coconspirator in creating dependency on a twenty-first-century version of free commodity cheese, or, most likely, something in between. Oddly, the largest Indian reservation in the United States would seem to provide an interesting counterexample to ESRI's quest for centralized enterprise GIS. Approximately 200,000 Navajos widely dispersed across 27,000 square miles belong to one of 110 Navajo chapters, one of the key Navajo social units. The Navajo's Local Governance Act of 1998 put greater land-use power into these distributed chapters in the interests of continuing the traditional investment of local decision making on local matters in the individual chapter houses. Here, GIS development since 1998 appears to have taken on the character of a distributed rather than centralized enterprise. On the other hand, this has not prevented reification of GIS decision-making authority. For example, the tradition of relying on elders' orally transmitted information for land-use decisions regarding Navajo transhumance practices has now been replaced by “illustrated” GIS representations. Basing such decisions on GIS is compatible with Navajo society, the writers of this entry declare, because it is a visual technology. Surely this is a gross rationalization. GIS is not merely mapmaking for illustration, and denying the culture-changing power of digital representations seems a bit disingenuous. But I sense these authors are in a difficult position as owner-operators of the Navajo GIS consulting firm helping to push economic development on the reservation. They drank ESRI's kool-aid, but they still live in Diné Bikéyah and so must walk a fine line between rank technophilia and respect for the elders' oral systems for decision making that still work. I am equally skeptical about their claim that chapter boundaries are not being physically recorded in the same way as non-Navajo boundary lines. The line work on the sample maps simply does not support this assertion. The sole compelling entry in the book is singular because the project does not appear to involve tribal government. Indigenous science educator Lisa Lone Fight writes with force and intelligence, while dumping the jargoneering so annoyingly common in writing about GIS. Instead, she is interested in bending and redefining technical terms to reflect her intent to place GIS and remote sensing technology at the service of everyday people in communities on the Wind River Reservation, and to do so according to the principles of Shoshone and Arapaho cultural systems. She deploys her own acronym, RIPSS (Respecting Indigenous Participatory Spatial Sovereignty), in describing ways to bring young Indian students and elders together to reclaim occupancy and use of reservation spaces. In my estimation, Lone Fight's work with Indian students is the only reason to look at this book. Although the phrase is not used, this is a fine example of community participation GIS that underscores the value of human enterprise, not ESRI enterprise. It is apparently taking longer for GIS to become normal than its proponents had expected. So here we are, forty-three years after ESRI's founding and there is no claim on behalf of GIS that is still too large to make. As we have come to expect from ESRI publications, the book is marred by the usual grandiloquent claims about GIS improving “the lives of people, and the health of the planet” and how “GIS practitioners on tribal lands … are … making this world a better place.” Well, of course! Just as the editors are graciously providing Indians information on how GIS and “ the spatial perspective” can make tribal organizations “more efficient and more effective” (p. ix, emphasis added). Reading such naive and arrogant prose should make us pause to recall that one of the goals of more than two centuries of internal colonization has been the elimination of indigenous spatial perspectives far more complex than what the Europeans brought to the continent. So it is more than a little ironic that ESRI executives now imagine themselves instructing Indian societies on what European Americans have tried so hard to eliminate. Sometimes the bombast is even more amazing, as in the fourth chapter where we learn there are “complex tapestries of land ownership within many reservation boundaries” (p. 49, emphasis added) and where we see Indian lands flipped into “realty” and “real estate programs” (p. 50). The editors also claim this as the first book to have tribal leaders writing about GIS use in their communities. It might be true if this was an accurate statement about the contributors, but it is not. Most contributors are not part of the leadership in their communities. They are merely GIS designers and users working under the government–ESRI aegis, and many are non-Indian specialists hired in from the outside. When I reflect on my experience attending some of the first sessions targeting Indians at ESRI User Conferences, I remember just how zealous some of the Indian and non-Indian speakers were. Fully subscribed to the instrumental rationality from which ESRI so eagerly profits, many were simply seeking to enhance their position as mouthpieces for the industry by shilling for the company. With the exception of Lone Fight's account, this book, published more than two decades later, is no different.
    Download Collect
  • Economic Psychology: Intersections in Theory and Applicationby Alan J. MacFadyen; Heather W. MacFadyen

    Review by: Bruno S. Frey  

    Download Collect
  • The Nileby Robert O. Collins;Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudanby Heather J. Sharkey

    Review by: M. W. Daly  

    Download Collect
  • The Nileby Robert O. Collins;Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudanby Heather J. Sharkey

    Review by: M. W. Daly  

    Download Collect
  • Categories, Constituents and Constituent Order in Pitjantjatjara: An Ab-Original Language of Australiaby Heather J. Bowe

    Review by: Doris Payne  

    Download Collect
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Contact

If you have any feedback, Please follow the official account to submit feedback.

Turn on your phone and scan

Submit Feedback