Micmac -- Urban residence, Indigenous peoples -- Urban residence, Micmac -- Social conditions, Indigenous peoples -- Social conditions, Micmac, Urbanization 

"The Micmac Indians are alive and well and living in Boston. A new Indian culture, born of a nomadic movement from reservation to urban slum and back again, has developed across the country. Its elements consist of tribal myths readapted to urban needs, a tribal social structure based on mutual indebtedness, and a freewheeling, mobile work force of young men and women who restlessly move from city to city, job to job to eke out a living in industrialized North America.

In the past anthropologists went to Indian reservations in order to document their traditional cultures before the old ways were totally corrupted by white influence. Much valuable research has been conducted in this way; but it is research which presents Indians as frozen in the mold of the past or as museum artifacts unable to deal with the modern world.

Jeanne Guillemin went to the Micmac Indians to find out how they are living now, not how they lived in the past. What kinds of adjustments and concessions have they made to survive in modern, white-dominated culture? What are their attitudes toward white society and toward themselves? What are their survival strategies for urban America? What she discovered was a viral culture on the fringes of white America; fiercely independent people who have managed to circumvent the institutions purporting to govern them.

Jeanne Guillemin has brought this new Indian culture to life, sparking her sociological inquiry with a vitality too often missing from works of scholarship. Her interpretations, based on a variety of methodological approaches, are always fresh, and her analysis is stimulating and provocative. She outlines the known history of the Micmac from their first contact with white men in the sixteenth century. When she deals with the new Micmac, she often lets them speak for themselves: printing verbatim the stories of their adventures in the city.

There is a welcome personal feeling in her narrative of these indomitable people. The concluding chapter discusses her relationship with the Micmac she met and what this field work taught her about herself and her own milieu. This appealing rediscovery of a vibrant Indian culture in our cities will inform and entertain a wide audience of sociologists, anthropologists, and above all, general readers."--Book jacket. 

viii, 336 pages : maps ; 21 cm. 

Includes index.