Voices of Indianness : the lived world of Native American women

Cultural and social genocide is believed to be the most important issue confronting contemporary Native American women. The purpose of this research was to provide greater understanding of the life experiences of four Native American women and the process whereby contemporary Native American women are socialized into a non-Indian environment and maintain multiple identities. Utilizing interpretive inquiry, which draws from the theoretical perspective of Martin Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology, the researcher explored the processes that constitute the Native American women's ability to interconnect among cultures: culture/identity, educational experiences, employment experiences, mother-daughter relationships, and spirituality. The interpretive paradigm, used for the study because it encourages dialogue as a method for gaining understanding, invited the Native American women to speak about their experiences, to explain, to interpret, and to become partners with the researcher as they cooperatively searched for mutual understanding of their lived experiences