Family/Tribal Ethnography: Combining Family/Tribal History and Intimate Ethnography

Abstract

I decided to coin a new term, family/tribal ethnography, by which I mean focusing on tribal perspectives of Native families. I argue here that family/tribal ethnography occupies the intersection of anthropology and history, and more specifically family/tribal history and intimate ethnography. For far too long, White anthropologists wrote biographies about Natives, assuming Indigenous people could not write their own life stories, and did not gain permission to write about Native family archival material. Family/tribal ethnography helps Natives learn about our kinship relations, claim Indigeneity, and expand family to include more-than-humans.