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E-book
Author Poyer, Lin, 1953- author.

Title War at the Margins : Indigenous Experiences in World War II / Lin Poyer
Published Honolulu : University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2022
Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 0000
2022

Copies

Description 1 online resource (pages cm)
Series Book collections on Project MUSE
Contents Empires, Nation-States, and Global War at the Margins -- Military Service, Citizenship, and Loyalties -- Combat in Indigenous Homelands -- War Far from Home: Serving Abroad -- Strangers in the Homeland -- Deploying the "Primitive": Images and Realities of Indigenous Soldiers -- "Martial Myths" and Native Realities -- Collateral Damages: Civilian Life in Wartime -- Working at War -- Building and Destroying the World through War -- Indigenous Status in the Postwar World -- Indigenous Veterans in Combatant Nations -- The Pasts and Futures of World War II for Indigenous Communities -- Beyond Nation-States
Summary "War at the Margins offers a broad comparative view of the impact of World War II on Indigenous societies. Using historical and ethnographic sources, Lin Poyer examines how Indigenous communities emerged from the trauma of the wartime era with social forms and cultural ideas that laid the foundations for their twenty-first century emergence as players on the world's political stage. With a focus on Indigenous voices and agency, a global overview reveals the enormous range of wartime activities and impacts on these groups, connecting this work with comparative history, Indigenous studies, and anthropology. The distinctiveness of Indigenous peoples offers a valuable perspective on World War II, as those on the margins of Allied and Axis empires and nation-states were drawn in as soldiers, scouts, guides, laborers, and victims. Questions of loyalty and citizenship shaped Indigenous combat roles-from integration in national armies to service in separate ethnic units to unofficial use of their special skills, where local knowledge tilted the balance in military outcomes. Front lines crossed Indigenous territory most consequentially in northern Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands, but the impacts of war go well beyond combat. Like others around the world, Indigenous civilian men and women suffered bombing and invasion, displacement, forced labor, military occupation, and economic and social disruption. Infrastructure construction and demand for key resources affected even areas far from front lines. World War II dissolved empires and laid the foundation for the postcolonial world. Indigenous people in newly independent nations struggled for autonomy, while other veterans returned to home fronts still steeped in racism. National governments saw military service as evidence that Indigenous peoples wished to assimilate, but wartime experiences confirmed many communities' commitment to their home cultures and opened new avenues for activism. By century's end, Indigenous Rights became an international political force, offering alternative visions of how the global order might make room for greater local self-determination and cultural diversity. In examining this transformative era, War at the Margins adds an important contribution to both World War II history and to the development of global Indigenous identity"-- Provided by publisher
Notes Description based on print version record
Subject Indigenous peoples -- Civil rights.
World War, 1939-1945 -- Participation, Indigenous.
World War, 1939-1945 -- Indigenous peoples.
Indigenous peoples -- Civil rights
Indigenous peoples
Form Electronic book
Author Project Muse. distributor.
LC no. 2021062389
ISBN 9780824891824
9780824891800
0824891805
9780824891817
9780824891794
0824891791
0824891821
0824891813