Uncovering how and where Indigenous and settler communities found common ground using newly public church records
Puritans in the American colonies created Congregationalism, a Protestant denomination where power rested in each congregation rather than a larger central body. As has often been told, the official Puritan mission included outreach to Indigenous people. This may appear as nothing more than forced conversion under colonization, but church records from Massachusetts—digitized and made public for the first time—reveal the authenticity of this Indigenous religious experience, as evidenced by commonalities between the Congregational way and some aspects of local Native American cultures. The records also show how the decentralized churches stood in contrast to a growing civil government in the colonies.
Lori Rogers-Stokes focuses on the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the decades around the turn of the eighteenth century, a period bookended by King Philip’s War and the First Great Awakening. She uses as her primary source the many records kept by individual Congregational churches of the time. These records, accumulated over generations, have been missing from the historical record, allowing overly simplistic accounts of this religious community to circulate. With church records now available, Rogers-Stokes reveals a more realistic picture of diverse congregations and contrasts their internal workings—which show inherent flexibility and a focus on a shared creation of community—with a developing civil government focused on consolidating power around white landowners. The result is a story that can expand how scholars write about this period, this region, and these communities, both settler and Indigenous.
Going Indian explores Indian (as opposed to tribal) ethnic identity among Native American people in Oklahoma through their telling, in their own words, of how they became Indian and what being Indian means to them today. Divided into four parts, the book features Oklahoma Indians' constructions of their histories and their view of today's native populations, their experiences with forced removals and Indian educational institutions, the meaning they place on blood quantum and ancestry in relation to Indian identity, and their practice of religion in Native churches.
James Hamill makes extensive use of the Indian Pioneer and Doris Duke material at the University of Oklahoma's Western History Library to assemble these narratives, using interviews collected between 1937-38 and 1967-70, as well as interviews he conducted from 2000 to 2001. While most books on Native American people in Oklahoma focus on tribes and their histories, Hamill instead explores the use of Indian symbolism across a wide field of experience to reveal what they thought and what they think about these various issues, and how these have influenced and affected their self-perceptions over time.
In this food memoir, named for the manoomin or wild rice that also gives the Menominee tribe its name, tribal member Thomas Pecore Weso takes readers on a cook’s journey through Wisconsin’s northern woods. He connects each food—beaver, trout, blackberry, wild rice, maple sugar, partridge—with colorful individuals who taught him Indigenous values. Cooks will learn from his authentic recipes. Amateur and professional historians will appreciate firsthand stories about reservation life during the mid-twentieth century, when many elders, fluent in the Algonquian language, practiced the old ways.
Weso’s grandfather Moon was considered a medicine man, and his morning prayers were the foundation for all the day’s meals. Weso’s grandmother Jennie "made fire" each morning in a wood-burning stove, and oversaw huge breakfasts of wild game, fish, and fruit pies. As Weso grew up, his uncles taught him to hunt bear, deer, squirrels, raccoons, and even skunks for the daily larder. He remembers foods served at the Menominee fair and the excitement of "sugar bush," maple sugar gatherings that included dances as well as hard work.
Weso uses humor to tell his own story as a boy learning to thrive in a land of icy winters and summer swamps. With his rare perspective as a Native anthropologist and artist, he tells a poignant personal story in this unique book.
Beloved Houma/Choctaw storyteller Grayhawk Perkins shares age-old wisdom in an unforgettable collection of folktales.
Grayhawk’s Native American Folktales is the eagerly awaited collection of stories by Grayhawk Perkins, a noted Houma/Choctaw storyteller from Louisiana. Drawing on traditional Indigenous tales, Grayhawk transforms these narratives into stories that captivate contemporary readers and audiences.
The collection features universal animal characters such as Deer, Rabbit, Bobcat, Turtle, and Snake that embody a variety of traits. Their adventures and challenges in the natural world reveal human behavior and lessons about how to treat others. Creation stories explain how the world and its inhabitants came to be, including the diligent Crawfish, the origin of skunk stripes, and why opossums are white. Although written for children ages 7 to 12 and their families, all will be charmed by Grayhawk’s contributions to Indigenous literature.
Documenting the long struggle of the Narragansett Nation to protect their land, sovereignty, and future
On a hot mid-July morning in 2003, members of the Narragansett Nation formed an impromptu human shield. They assembled to protect what they understood to be sacred and sovereign land. On the other side of the road stood dozens of local police officers and more than twenty state troopers, acting on direct orders from Rhode Island Governor Donald L. Carcieri to forcibly close a smoke shop the state claimed was operating illegally. It was a flashpoint in a long, drawn-out, and continuing struggle—one that historian Mack H. Scott III, himself a member of the Narragansett Nation, has spent his career documenting.
In The Great Tree and the Summer Sun, Scott tells the story of his people: the largest and most influential Indigenous community in the Dawnland, the coastal New England region his ancestors have called home for centuries. The Narragansett, whom the sachem Miantonomo described as “a great tree,” have endured nearly 400 years of mostly adversarial relations with their non-Indigenous neighbors—despite the mythology of Rhode Island’s benevolent founding and its supposed social egalitarianism.
Scott explores the long durée of local cross-cultural interactions that hardened hearts, minds, and viewpoints, not just in Rhode Island, but throughout Turtle Island (North America), as Natives and newcomers struggled to reconstitute and redefine themselves within a contested landscape. Commencing in the seventeenth century and concluding in the twenty-first, this episodic historical survey foregrounds the varied experiences of members of the Great Tree as they negotiated the realities of the Summer Sun—settler colonialism—to ensure that their futures remained irrepressible.
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