BiblioVault - Books about Indians of North America

Dakotah

The Return of the Future

By Charles Bowden; foreword by Terry Tempest Williams

University of Texas Press, 2019

“On a bend, I will see it, a piece of ground off to the side. I will know the feel of this place: the leaves stir slowly on the trees, dry air smells like dust, birds dart and the trails are made by beasts living free.”

When award-winning author Charles Bowden died in 2014, he left behind a trove of unpublished manuscripts. Dakotah marks the landmark publication of the first of these texts, and the fourth installment in his acclaimed “Unnatural History of America.” Bowden uses America’s Great Plains as a lens—sometimes sullied, sometimes shattered, but always sharp—for observing pivotal moments in the lives of anguished figures, including himself.

In scenes that are by turns wrenching and poetic, Bowden describes the Sioux’s forced migrations and rebellions alongside his own ancestors’ migrations from Europe to Midwestern acres beset by unforgiving winters. He meditates on the lives of his resourceful mother and his philosophical father, who rambled between farm communities and city life. Interspersed with these images are clear-eyed, textbook-defying anecdotes about Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone, and, with equal verve, twentieth-century entertainers “Pee Wee” Russell, Peggy Lee, and other musicians. The result is a kaleidoscopic journey that penetrates the senses and redefines the notion of heartland. Dakotah is a powerful ode to loss from one of our most fiercely independent writers.

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Dancing Ghosts

Native American And Christian Syncretism In Mary Austin'S Work

Mark T. Hoyer

University of Nevada Press, 1998

A significant and innovative contribution to Austin studies. How did an Illinois Methodist homesteader in the West come to create one of the most significant cosmological syntheses in American literature? In this study, Hoyer draws on his own knowledge of biblical religion and Native American cultures to explore Austin's creation of the "mythology of the American continent" she so valued. Austin lived in and wrote about "the land of little rain," semiarid and arid parts of California and Nevada that were home to the Northern Paiute, Shoshone, Interior Chumash, and Yokut peoples. Hoyer makes new and provocative connections between Austin and spiritual figures like Wovoka, the prophet of the Ghost Dance religion, and writers like Zitkala-sa and Mourning Dove, and he provides a particularly fine reading of Cogowea.

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The Daring Trader

Jacob Smith in the Michigan Territory, 1802-1825

Kim Crawford

Michigan State University Press, 2012

A fur trader in the Michigan Territory and confidant of both the U.S. government and local Indian tribes, Jacob Smith could have stepped out of a James Fenimore Cooper novel. Controversial, mysterious, and bold during his lifetime, in death Smith has not, until now, received the attention he deserves as a pivotal figure in Michigan’s American period and the War of 1812. This is the exciting and unlikely story of a man at the frontier’s edge, whose missions during both war and peace laid the groundwork for Michigan to accommodate settlers and farmers moving west. The book investigates Smith’s many pursuits, including his role as an advisor to the Indians, from whom the federal government would gradually gain millions of acres of land, due in large part to Smith’s work as an agent of influence. Crawford paints a colorful portrait of a complicated man during a dynamic period of change in Michigan’s history.

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A Dark Pathway

Precontact Native American Mud Glyphs From 1st Unnamed Cave, Tennessee

Jan F. Simek

University of Tennessee Press, 2022

In A Dark Pathway: Precontact Native American Mud Glyphs from 1st Unnamed Cave, Tennessee, Jan Simek and his colleagues present two decades of research at a precontact dark zone cave art site in East Tennessee. Discovered in 1994, 1st Unnamed Cave ushered in an extensive and systematic effort to research precontact cave art sites in the Eastern Woodlands, where the tradition of cave art production was widespread among ancient peoples. Indeed, when a preliminary report about 1st Unnamed Cave was first published in 1997, there were only seven known cave art sites across the Southeast; today, that number exceeds ninety.

From the tale of the cave’s discovery in chapter 1 to descriptions of its art in later chapters, A Dark Pathway boasts nearly one hundred maps, high-resolution photographs, and illustrations that bring the story of one of North America’s premier cave art sites to life. Importantly, Simek and his colleagues also orient 1st Unnamed Cave within the broader context of cave art sites across the Southeast, elevating them as a whole to the notable prominence they deserve. Yet his analysis does more than present and situate the discovery of 1st Unnamed Cave within the greater realm of regional cave art site studies; it also calls for the protection and preservation of these fragile sites and for the acknowledgment of the still-vibrant indigenous cultures that produced them.

With a foreword by Russell Townsend, tribal historic preservation officer for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, A Dark Pathway is a long-awaited volume more than twenty years in the making. Even as he delivers a comprehensive archaeological analysis, Simek’s clear presentation makes for accessible and thrilling reading not only for students of archaeology, anthropology, and Native American studies, but for interested readers as well.

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Dark Thirty

Santee Frazier

University of Arizona Press, 2009

Writing sometimes in dialect, sometimes in gunshot bursts, sometimes in sinuous lines that snake across the page, Santee Frazier crafts poems that are edgy and restless. The poems in Dark Thirty, Frazier’s debut collection, address subjects that are not often thought of as “poetic,” like poverty, alcoholism, cruelty, and homelessness. Frazier’s poems emerge from the darkest corners of experience: “I search the cabinet and icebox—drink the pickle juice / from the jar. Bologna, / hard at the edges, / browning on the kitchen / table since yesterday. / I search the cabinet and icebox—the curdling / milk almost smells drinkable.”

Dark Thirty takes us on a loosely autobiographical trip through Cherokee country, the backwoods towns and the big cities, giving us clear-eyed portraits of Native people surviving contemporary America. In Frazier’s world, there is no romanticizing of Native American life. Here cops knock on the door of a low-rent apartment after a neighbor has been stabbed. Here a poem’s narrator recalls firing a .38 pistol—“barrel glowing like oil in a gutter-puddle”—for the first time. Here a young man catches a Greyhound bus to Flagstaff after his ex-girlfriend tells him he has fathered a child. Yet even in the midst of violence and despair there is time for the beauty of the world to shine through: “The Cutlass rattling out / the last fumes of gas, engine stops, / the night dimly lit by the moon / hung over the treetops; / owls calling each other from / hilltop to valley bend.”

Like viewing photographs that repel us even as they draw us in, we are pulled into these poems. We’re compelled to turn the page and read the next poem. And the next. And each poem rewards us with a world freshly seen and remade for us of sound and image and voice.

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Deadliest Enemies

Law and Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation

Thomas Biolsi

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Many people living far away from Indian reservations express sympathy for the poverty and misery experienced by Native Americans, yet, Thomas Biolsi argues, the problems faced by Native Americans are the results of white privilege.

In Deadliest Enemies, Biolsi connects the origins of racial tension between Indians and non-Indians on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota to federal laws, showing how the courts have created opposing political interests along race lines. Biolsi demonstrates that the court’s definitions of legal rights—both constitutional and treaty rights—make solutions to racial tensions intractable.

This powerful work sheds much-needed light on racial conflicts in South Dakota and in the rest of the United States, and holds white people accountable for the benefits of their racial privilege that come at the expense of Native Americans.

Thomas Biolsi is professor of Native American studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

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Deadly Landscapes

Case Studies in Prehistoric Southwestern Warfare

Glen E. Rice

University of Utah Press, 2012

Deadly Landscapes presents a series of cases that advance the rigorous examination of war in the archaeological record. The studies encompass examples from the Hohokam, Sinagua, Mogollon, and Anasazi regions, plus a pan-regional study of iconography covering the Colorado Plateau and the Rio Grande Valley. All of the cases focus on the narrow time frame from AD 1200 to the early-1400s, during which evidence for warfare is most pervasive.

Contributors to this volume present varying definitions of warfare and use differing types of data to test for the presence of warfare. These detailed case studies give clear demonstration of a pattern of significant warfare in the late prehistoric period that will alter our understanding of ancient Southwestern cultures.

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The Deadly Politics of Giving

Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke, and Jamestown

Seth Mallios

University of Alabama Press, 2006

A clash of cultures on the North American continent.

With a focus on indigenous cultural systems and agency theory, this volume analyzes Contact Period relations between North American Middle Atlantic Algonquian Indians and the Spanish Jesuits at Ajacan (1570–72) and English settlers at Roanoke Island (1584–90) and Jamestown Island (1607–12). It is an anthropological and ethnohistorical study of how European violations of Algonquian gift-exchange systems led to intercultural strife during the late 1500s and early 1600s, destroying Ajacan and Roanoke, and nearly destroying Jamestown.

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Decolonizing Indigenous Histories

Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology

Edited by Maxine Oland, Siobhan M. Hart, and Liam Frink

University of Arizona Press, 2012

Decolonizing Indigenous Histories makes a vital contribution to the decolonization of archaeology by recasting colonialism within long-term indigenous histories. Showcasing case studies from Africa, Australia, Mesoamerica, and North and South America, this edited volume highlights the work of archaeologists who study indigenous peoples and histories at multiple scales.

The contributors explore how the inclusion of indigenous histories, and collaboration with contemporary communities and scholars across the subfields of anthropology, can reframe archaeologies of colonialism. The cross-cultural case studies employ a broad range of methodological strategies—archaeology, ethnohistory, archival research, oral histories, and descendant perspectives—to better appreciate processes of colonialism. The authors argue that these more complicated histories of colonialism contribute not only to understandings of past contexts but also to contemporary social justice projects.

In each chapter, authors move beyond an academic artifice of “prehistoric” and “colonial” and instead focus on longer sequences of indigenous histories to better understand colonial contexts. Throughout, each author explores and clarifies the complexities of indigenous daily practices that shape, and are shaped by, long-term indigenous and local histories by employing an array of theoretical tools, including theories of practice, agency, materiality, and temporality.

Included are larger integrative chapters by Kent Lightfoot and Patricia Rubertone, foremost North American colonialism scholars who argue that an expanded global perspective is essential to understanding processes of indigenous-colonial interactions and transitions.

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Decolonizing “Prehistory”

Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America

Edited by Gesa Mackenthun and Christen Mucher

University of Arizona Press, 2021

Decolonizing “Prehistory” combines a critical investigation of the documentation of the American deep past with perspectives from Indigenous traditional knowledges and attention to ongoing systems of intellectual colonialism. Bringing together experts from American studies, archaeology, anthropology, legal studies, history, and literary studies, this interdisciplinary volume offers essential information about the complexity and ambivalence of colonial encounters with Indigenous peoples in North America, and their impact on American scientific discourse. The chapters in this book reveal how anthropology, archaeology, and cultural heritage have shaped the collective ideological construction of Indigenous cultures, while actively empowering the voices that disrupt conventional tropes and narratives of “prehistory.”

Constructions of America’s ancient past—or the invention of American “prehistory”—occur in national and international political frameworks, which are characterized by struggles over racial and ethnic identities, access to resources and environmental stewardship, the commodification of culture for touristic purposes, and the exploitation of Indigenous knowledges and histories by industries ranging from education to film and fashion. The past’s ongoing appeal reveals the relevance of these narratives to current-day concerns about individual and collective identities and pursuits of sovereignty and self-determination, as well as to questions of the origin—and destiny—of humanity. Decolonizing “Prehistory” critically examines and challenges the paradoxical role that modern scholarship plays in adding legitimacy to, but also delegitimizing, contemporary colonialist practices.

Contributors: Rick Budhwa, Keith Thor Carlson, Kirsten Matoy Carlson, Jessica Christie, Philip J. Deloria, Melissa Gniadek, Annette Kolodny, Gesa Mackenthun, Christen Mucher, Naxaxalhts’i (aka Sonny McHalsie), Jeff Oliver, Mathieu Picas, Daniel Lord Smail, Coll Thrush

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Detroit's Hidden Channels

The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century

Karen L. Marrero

Michigan State University Press, 2020

French-Indigenous families were a central force in shaping Detroit’s history. Detroit’s Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century examines the role of these kinship networks in Detroit’s development as a site of singular political and economic importance in the continental interior. Situated where Anishinaabe, Wendat, Myaamia, and later French communities were established and where the system of waterways linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico narrowed, Detroit’s location was its primary attribute. While the French state viewed Detroit as a decaying site of illegal activities, the influence of the French-Indigenous networks grew as members diverted imperial resources to bolster an alternative configuration of power relations that crossed Indigenous and Euro-American nations. Women furthered commerce by navigating a multitude of gender norms of their nations, allowing them to defy the state that sought to control them by holding them to European ideals of womanhood. By the mid-eighteenth century, French-Indigenous families had become so powerful, incoming British traders and imperial officials courted their favor. These families would maintain that power as the British imperial presence splintered on the eve of the American Revolution.

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The Development of Southeastern Archaeology

Edited by Jay K. Johnson

University of Alabama Press, 1993

Ten scholars whose specialties range from ethnohistory to remote sensing and lithic analysis to bioarchaeology chronicle changes in the way prehistory in the Southeast has been studied since the 19th century. Each brings to the task the particular perspective of his or her own subdiscipline in this multifaceted overview of the history of archaeology in a region that has had an important but variable role in the overall development of North American archaeology.

Some of the specialties discussed in this book were traditionally relegated to appendixes or ignored completely in site reports more than 20 years old. Today, most are integral parts of such reports, but this integration has been hard won. Other specialties have been and will continue to be of central concern to archaeologists. Each chapter details the way changes in method can be related to changes in theory by reviewing major landmarks in the literature. As a consequence, the reader can compare the development of each subdiscipline.

As the first book of this kind to deal specifically with the region, it be will valuable to archaeologists everywhere. The general reader will find the book of interest because the development of southeastern archaeology reflects trends in the development of social science as a whole.

Contributors include:

Jay K. Johnson, David S. Brose, Jon L. Gibson, Maria O. Smith, Patricia K. Galloway, Elizabeth J. Reitz, Kristen J. Gremillion, Ronald L. Bishop, Veletta Canouts, and W. Fredrick Limp

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Devil in Deerskins

My Life with Grey Owl

Anahareo

University of Manitoba Press, 2014