Crisscrossing Pleistocene terrace tops and overlooking the Gila River in southeastern Arizona are acres and acres of rock alignments that have perplexed archaeologists for a century. Well known but poorly understood, these features have long been considered agricultural, but exactly what was cultivated, how, and why remained a mystery. Now we know. Drawing on the talents of a team of scholars representing various disciplines, including geology, soil science, remote sensing, geographical information sciences (GISc), hydrology, botany, palynology, and archaeology, the editors of this volume explain when and why the grids were built.

Between A.D. 750 and 1385, people gathered rocks from the tops of the terraces and rearranged them in grids of varying size and shape, averaging about 4 meters to 5 meters square. The grids captured rainfall and water accumulated under the rocks forming the grids. Agave was planted among the rocks, providing a dietary supplement to the maize and beans that were irrigated on the nearby bottom land, a survival crop when the staple crops failed, and possibly a trade commodity when yields were high. Stunning photographs by Adriel Heisey convey the vastness of the grids across the landscape.

In this provocative new book, Margaret M. Bruchac, an Indigenous anthropologist, turns the word savage on its head. Savage Kin explores the nature of the relationships between Indigenous informants, such as Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Mohegan), Jesse Cornplanter (Seneca), and George Hunt (Tlingit), and early twentieth-century anthropological collectors, such as Frank Speck, Arthur C. Parker, William N. Fenton, and Franz Boas.

This book reconceptualizes the intimate details of encounters with Native interlocutors who by turns inspired, facilitated, and resisted the anthropological enterprise. Like other texts focused on this era, Savage Kin features some of the elite white men credited with salvaging material that might otherwise have been lost. Unlike other texts, this book highlights the intellectual contributions and cultural strategies of unsung Indigenous informants without whom this research could never have taken place.

These bicultural partnerships transgressed social divides and blurred the roles of anthropologist/informant, relative/stranger, and collector/collected. Yet these stories were obscured by collecting practices that separated people from objects, objects from communities, and communities from stories. Bruchac’s decolonizing efforts include “reverse ethnography”—painstakingly tracking seemingly unidentifiable objects, misconstrued social relations, unpublished correspondence, and unattributed field notes—to recover this evidence. Those early encounters generated foundational knowledges that still affect Indigenous communities today.

Savage Kin also contains unexpected narratives of human and other-­than-human encounters—brilliant discoveries, lessons from ancestral spirits, prophetic warnings, powerful gifts, and personal tragedies—that will move Native and non-Native readers alike.
 

This volume explores political change in chiefdoms, specifically how complex chiefdoms emerge and collapse, and how this process—called cycling—can be examined using archaeological, ethnohistoric, paleoclimatic, paleosubsistence, and physical anthropological data. The focus for the research is the prehistoric and initial contact-era Mississippian chiefdoms of the Southeastern United States, specifically the societies occupying the Savannah River basin from ca. A.D. 1000 to 1600. This regional focus and the multidisciplinary nature of the investigation provide a solid introduction to the Southeastern Mississippian archaeological record and the study of cultural evolution in general.

The 250th anniversary of the founding of Rutgers University is a perfect moment for the Rutgers community to reconcile its past, and acknowledge its role in the enslavement and debasement of African Americans and the disfranchisement and elimination of Native American people and culture.

Scarlet and Black documents the history of Rutgers’s connection to slavery, which was neither casual nor accidental—nor unusual. Like most early American colleges, Rutgers depended on slaves to build its campuses and serve its students and faculty; it depended on the sale of black people to fund its very existence. Men like John Henry Livingston, (Rutgers president from 1810–1824), the Reverend Philip Milledoler, (president of Rutgers from 1824–1840), Henry Rutgers, (trustee after whom the college is named), and Theodore Frelinghuysen, (Rutgers’s seventh president), were among the most ardent anti-abolitionists in the mid-Atlantic.

Scarlet and black are the colors Rutgers University uses to represent itself to the nation and world. They are the colors the athletes compete in, the graduates and administrators wear on celebratory occasions, and the colors that distinguish Rutgers from every other university in the United States. This book, however, uses these colors to signify something else: the blood that was spilled on the banks of the Raritan River by those dispossessed of their land and the bodies that labored unpaid and in bondage so that Rutgers could be built and sustained. The contributors to this volume offer this history as a usable one—not to tear down or weaken this very renowned, robust, and growing institution—but to strengthen it and help direct its course for the future.

The work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History.

This lively book recounts the explorations of the first generations of Spanish conquistadors and their Native allies. Author William K. Hartmann brings readers along as the explorers probe from Cuba to the Aztec capital of Mexico City, and then northward through the borderlands to New Mexico, the Grand Canyon, southern California, and as far as Kansas. Characters include Hernan Cortés, the conqueror; the Aztec ruler Motezuma; Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, a famous expedition leader; fray Marcos de Niza, an explorer-priest doomed to disgrace; and Viceroy Antonio Mendoza, the king’s representative who tried to keep the explorers under control.

Recounting eyewitness experiences that the Spaniards recorded in letters and memoirs, Hartmann describes ancient lifeways from Mexico to the western United States; Aztec accounts of the conquest; discussions between Aztec priests and Spanish priests about the nature of the universe; Cortés’s lifelong relationship with his famous Native mistress, Malinche (not to mention the mysterious fate of his wife); lost explorers who wandered from Florida to Arizona; and Marcos de Niza’s controversial reports of the “Seven Cities of Cíbola.”

Searching for Golden Empires describes how, even after the conquest of Mexico, Cortés remained a “wildcat” competitor with Coronado in a race to see who could find the “next golden empire,” believed to lie in the north. It is an exciting history of the shared story of the United States and Mexico, unveiling episodes both tragic and uplifting.

Sara Littlecrow-Russell’s style emerges from the ancient and sacred tradition of storytelling, where legends were told not just to entertain, but to teach and, if necessary, to discipline. The power of the storyteller is the power of naming, to establish a relationship, a connection, and a sense of meaning. A name is both a bequest and a burden. Each of the poems in this collection is, in essence, a naming ritual. Sharply, energetically, and always provocatively, these poems name uncomfortable moments, complex emotions, and sudden, often wryly humorous realizations.

As Littlecrow-Russell explores how names imposed by outsiders both collide and merge with the identities that Natives create for themselves, these poems decisively counter the images of Indians as colorful dancers, stoic saints, and defeated warriors. These verses are not constructed of beautiful images, nor are they stories of redemption. Instead, Littlecrow-Russell offers stark and honest witness to urban and reservation life at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In short snaps of honed lyric and voice, she tackles topics ranging from family, love, and spirituality, to welfare, addiction, and the thorny politics of tribal identity. Her work displays tremendous bitterness and anger, but there is also dignity, humor, and plenty of irony.

Candid and compelling, this collection brings fluent verse and human face to the commonly misrepresented experiences of Native Americans.

For more than a hundred years, outsiders enamored of the perceived strengths of American Indian cultures have appropriated and distorted elements of them for their own purposes—more often than not ignoring the impact of the process on the Indians themselves. This book contains eight original contributions that consider the selling of American Indian culture and how it affects the Native community. It goes beyond studies of “white shamanism” to focus on commercial ventures, challenging readers to reconsider how Indian cultures have been commercialized in the twentieth century.

Some selections examine how Indians have been displayed to the public, beginning with a “living exhibit” of Cocopa Indians at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition and extending to contemporary stagings of Indian culture for tourists at Tillicum Village near Seattle. Other chapters range from the Cherokees to Puebloan peoples to Indians of Chiapas, Mexico, in an examination of the roles of both Indians and non-Indian reformers in marketing Native arts and crafts.

These articles show that the commercialization and appropriation of American Indian cultures have been persistent practices of American society over the last century and constitute a form of cultural imperialism that could contribute to the destruction of American Indian culture and identity. They offer a means toward understanding this complex process and provide a new window on Indian-white interactions.

CONTENTS

Part I: Staging the Indian
1. The “Shy” Cocopa Go to the Fair, Nancy J. Parezo and John W. Troutman
2. Command Performances: Staging Native Americans at Tillicum Village, Katie N. Johnson and Tamara Underiner
3. Savage Desires: The Gendered Construction of the American Indian in Popular Media, S. Elizabeth Bird
4. “Beyond Feathers and Beads”: Interlocking Narratives in the Music and Dance of Tokeya Inajin (Kevin Locke), Pauline Tuttle

Part II: Marketing the Indian
5. “The Idea of Help”: White Women Reformers and the Commercialization of Native American Women’s Arts, Erik Trump
6. Saving the Pueblos: Commercialism and Indian Reform in the 1920s, Carter Jones Meyer
7. Marketing Traditions: Cherokee Basketry and Tourist Economies, Sarah H. Hill
8. Crafts, Tourism, and Traditional Life in Chiapas, Mexico: A Tale Related by a Pillowcase, Chris Goertzen

This book marks the culmination of fifteen years of collaboration between the University of Utah's American West Center and the Tohono O'oodham Nation's Education Department to collect documents and create curricular materials for use in their tribal school system. . . . Erickson has done an admirable job compiling this narrative.—Pacific Historical Review

Traces the sources of power and large-scale organization of prehistoric peoples among Archaic societies.

By focusing on the first instances of mound building, pottery making, fancy polished stone and bone, as well as specialized chipped stone, artifacts, and their widespread exchange, this book explores the sources of power and organization among Archaic societies. It investigates the origins of these technologies and their effects on long-term (evolutionary) and short-term (historical) change.

The characteristics of first origins in social complexity belong to 5,000- to 6,000-year-old Archaic groups who inhabited the southeastern United States. In Signs of Power, regional specialists identify the conditions, causes, and consequences that define organization and social complexity in societies. Often termed "big mound power," these considerations include the role of demography, kinship, and ecology in sociocultural change; the meaning of geometry and design in sacred groupings; the degree of advancement in stone tool technologies; and differentials in shell ring sizes that reflect social inequality.

Hate crimes against Native Americans are a common occurrence, Barbara Perry reveals, although most go unreported. In this eye-opening book, Perry shines a spotlight on these acts, which are often hidden in the shadows of crime reports. She argues that scholarly and public attention to the historical and contemporary victimization of Native Americans as tribes or nations has blinded both scholars and citizens alike to the victimization of individual Native Americans. It is these acts against individuals that capture her attention.

Silent Victims is a unique contribution to the literature on hate crime. Because most extant literature treats hate crimes—even racial violence—rather generically, this work breaks new ground with its findings. For this book, Perry interviewed nearly 300 Native Americans and gathered additional data in three geographic areas: the Four Corners region of the U.S. Southwest, the Great Lakes, and the Northern Plains. In all of these locales, she found that bias-related crime oppresses and segregates Native Americans.

Perry is well aware of the history of colonization in North America and its attendant racial violence. She argues that the legacy of violence today can be traced directly to the genocidal practices of early settlers, and she adds valuable insights into the ways in which “Indians” have been constructed as the Other by the prevailing culture. Perry’s interviews with Native Americans recount instances of appalling treatment, often at the hands of law enforcement officials. In her conclusion, Perry draws from her research and interviews to suggest ways in which Native Americans can be empowered to defend themselves against all forms of racist victimization.

Smoking has played an important role in the cultures of North America since ancient times. Because of the ceremonial and ritual aspects of the practice in Native American societies, smoking pipes are important cultural artifacts. The essays in The Culture of Smoking constitute the first sustained interpretive study of smoking pipes, focusing on the cultural significance of smoking both before and after European contact.

Pipes lend themselves to anthropological as well as archaeological analysis in part because they are more ceremonial than utilitarian. Thus, while their styles and provenance can reveal something about trade relationships, cultural transfer, and aesthetic influences, they also provide important information about the nature of ritual in a particular society. As the contributors demonstrate, pipes offer a window through which to view the symbolic, ideological, and political roles that smoking has played in North American societies from prehistoric times to the nineteenth century.

The eleven essays included range widely over time and region, beginning with a case study of pipes and mortuary practices in the Ohio Valley during the Early Woodland Period. Subsequent chapters examine stone pipes from coastal North Carolina during the Late Woodland Period and the role pipes played in interregional interaction among protohistoric Native American groups in the Midwest and Northeast. Other essays explore the variety of cultural and political uses of pipes during the period of European contact. The final section of the book focuses on smoking in Euro-American contexts of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.

The innovative interpretive approaches taken by the contributors and the broad historical perspective will make The Culture of Smoking a model for examining other categories of material culture, and the volume will be welcomed by anthropologists and historians as well as archaeologists.

Sean M. Rafferty is associate professor of anthropology at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Rob Mann is the southeast regional archaeologist for Louisiana and is based in the Museum of Natural Science at Louisiana State University.

Spontaneous acts of violence born of human emotions like anger or greed are probably universal, but social violence—violence resulting from social relationships within and between groups of people—is a much more complex issue with implications beyond archaeology. Recent research has generated multiple interpretations about the forms, intensity, and underlying causes of social violence in the ancient Southwest. Deborah L. Nichols and Patricia L. Crown have gathered nine contributions from a variety of disciplines to examine social violence in the prehispanic American Southwest. Not only offering specific case studies but also delving into theoretical aspects, this volume looks at archaeological interpretations, multidisciplinary approaches, and the implications of archaeological research for Native peoples and how they are impacted by what archaeologists say about their past. Specific chapters address the impacts of raiding and warfare, the possible origins of ritual violence, the evidence for social violence manifested in human skeletal remains, the implications of witchcraft persecution, and an examination of the reasons behind apparent anthropophagy. There is little question that social violence occurred in the American Southwest. These contributions support the need for further discussion and investigation into its causes and the broader implications for archaeology and anthropology.

CONTENTS

1. Introduction
Patricia Crown and Deborah Nichols

2. Dismembering the Trope: Imagining Cannibalism in the Ancient Pueblo World
Randall H. McGuire and Ruth Van Dyke

3. An Outbreak of Violence and Raiding in the Central Mesa Verde Region in the 12th Century AD
Brian R. Billman

4. Chaco Horrificus?
Wendy Bustard

5. Inscribed in the Body, Written in Bones: The Consequences of Social Violence at La Plata
Debra L. Martin, Nancy Akins, Bradley Crenshaw, and Pamela K. Stone

6. Veneration or Violence: A Study of Variations in Patterns of Human Bone Modification at La Quemada
Ventura R. Pérez, Ben A. Nelson, and Debra L. Martin

7. Witches, Practice, and the Context of Pueblo Cannibalism
William H. Walker

8. Explanation vs. Sensation: The Discourse of Cannibalism at Awat’ovi
Peter Whiteley

9. Devouring Ourselves
George J. Armelagos

References Cited
About the Contributors
Index

In 1853, a survey team under Amiel W. Whipple set out for California from Fort Smith, Arkansas, in search of a transcontinental railroad route. In addition to studying the engineering obstacles for the railroad, the party collected natural history specimens in this unexplored and dangerous corner of America—and when the expedition entered New Mexico, it requested an additional military escort to guard against hostile Indians. An 1848 West Point graduate, Lt. John C. Tidball had only recently arrived at Fort Defiance in New Mexico, when he received his orders to join the surveying party. Although his official duties were strictly military, Tidball began sketching as soon as he joined the expedition, and his talents made him an indispensable member of Whipple’s artistic staff. This book offers a new look at the Whipple expedition through the lens of a newly discovered manuscript of Tidball’s memoirs—the only firsthand account of the 35th parallel survey to be discovered in nearly thirty years. Soldier-Artist of the Great Reconnaissance includes much of the material from this manuscript, giving us John Tidball’s pungent observations on the journey as well as striking examples of his artwork. Melding the observations of several diarists—which sometimes presented opposing viewpoints—author Eugene Tidball offers a new perspective on the Whipple expedition that focuses on the diverse personalities of the party and on the Native Americans they encountered along the way. The Pacific Railroad Surveys were among the most important explorations of North America ever undertaken. Eugene Tidball’s account of this journey tells how the artistic and literary contributions of John Tidball, his distant cousin, enrich our understanding of what the survey party saw and thought as they crossed the continent. Soldier-Artist of the Great Reconnaissance recaptures the Whipple expedition’s trials and triumphs as it documents the unusual talents of one of its most versatile members.

Beginning with their battle against the forces of Ponce de Leon, the Calusa Indians of southwest Florida entered a dark period of European invasion and native resistance, which changed the nature and course of life on the North American continent.

 

Song of the Tides is a work of anthropological fiction that is set during the period of the Spanish entrada into southwest Florida and their encounters with the Calusa. Relying on letters and memoirs, especially those of explorer Pedro Menendez de Aviles, shipwrecked captive Escalante Fontaneda, and the Jesuit priest Juan Rogel, Joseph has woven a tale of vivid historical detail and compelling human drama. Working with Calusa scholars, the author has created a superbly written account of the clash of two proud and dominant cultures. Told through the voice of Aesha, daughter of the great Calusa chief Caalus, as well as those of other political and spiritual leaders, the fictional narrative spans half a century of conflict with Spanish soldiers and Jesuits, infighting between bands, struggle to preserve their culture, and eventual defeat of the Spanish through wit and deceit.

In this anthology of poetry and fiction, ten Native Americans of California Indian ancestry illuminate aspects of their respective native cultures in works characterized by a profound love of place and people, as well as by anger over political oppression and social problems

A timely, comprehensive reevaluation of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex.

One of the most venerable concepts in Southeastern archaeology is that of the Southern Cult. The idea has its roots in the intensely productive decade (archaeologically) of the 1930s and is fundamentally tied to yet another venerable concept—Mississippian culture. The last comprehensive study of the melding of these two concepts into the term Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC) is more than two decades old, yet our understanding of the objects, themes, and artistic styles associated with the SECC have changed a great deal. New primary data have come to light that bear directly on the complex, requiring a thorough reanalysis of both concepts and dating. Recent publications have ignited many debates about the dating and the nature of the SECC.

This work presents new data and new ideas on the temporal and social contexts, artistic styles, and symbolic themes included in the complex. It also demonstrates that engraved shell gorgets, along with other SECC materials, were
produced before A.D. 1400.

This pictorial classic is a valuable ethnological record of southeastern Indians that also showcases the work of early photographers and artists.

A collection of over 350 photographs, paintings, drawings,and woodcuts, Life Portraits offers us an important visual representation of southeastern Indians—at work, at play, in rituals, and in death—when they first encountered Europeans.

Studied by historians and archaeologists, as well as museum exhibit designers and costumers, these illustrations provide a wealth of information on native dress and jewelry, house construction, agricultural techniques, warfare, and other aspects of American Indian life. Among the tribes illustrated are Natchez, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Chitimacha, Timucua, Powhatan, Tuscarora, Caddo, Yuchi, and Shawnee.

A special section of the book quotes historic narratives and comments on the life and work of the artists, lithographers, photographers, and engravers who made the originals. Included among these are Jacques le Moyne, John White, Theodore De Bry, Francis Parsons, Joshua Reynolds, John Trumball, George Catlin, John Mix Stanley, Thomas McKenney, and Samuel Waugh.

Life Portraits has been a classic title in southeastern archaeology and a staple of bookstores and museum shops around the country since its original publication in 1958. Because the carefully identified illustrations were secured from a wide variety of sources, including the British Museum, the Charleston Museum, the New York Public Library, and the Oklahoma Historical Society, this volume represents the most comprehensiveand widely available record of Indian images. Designed for Americana collections, it will appeal to general readers as well as professional historians and archaeologists.

Covering 19 years of excavations, this volume provides an invaluable collection of Moore's pioneering archaeological investigations along Alabama's waterways.

In 1996, The University of Alabama Press published The Moundville Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore, which covered a large part of Moore's early archaeological expeditions to the state of Alabama. This volume collects the balance of Moore's Alabama expeditions, with the exception of those Moore made along the Tennessee River, which will be collected in another, forthcoming volume focusing on the Tennessee basin.

This volume includes:

Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Alabama River (1899);

Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Tombigbee River(1901);

a portion of Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Northwest Florida Coast (1901);

The So-Called "Hoe-Shaped Implement" (1903);

Aboriginal Urn-Burial in the United States (1904);

A Form of Urn-Burial on Mobile Bay (1905);

Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Lower Tombigbee River (1905);

Certain Aboriginal Remains on Mobile Bay and on Mississippi Sound (1905);

a portion of Mounds of the Lower Chattahoochee and Lower Flint Rivers (1907);

a portion of The Northwest Florida Coast Revisited(1918).

Craig Sheldon's comprehensive introduction focuses both on the Moore expeditions and on subsequent archaeological excavations at
sites investigated by Moore. Sheldon places Moore's archaeological work in the context of his times and against the backdrop of similar investigations in the Southeast. Sheldon discusses practical matters, such as the various assistants Moore employed and their roles in these historic expeditions. He provides brief vignettes of daily life on the Gopher and describes Moore's work habits, revealing professional and personal biographical details previously unknown about this enigmatic archaeologist.

 

A classic resource on the struggle for dominance in southern North America during the colonial period

This volume recounts the clashes and intrigues that played out over the landscape of the Old Southwest and across six decades as the Spanish, French, British, and ultimately Americans vied for control. Rivalry began soon after initial discovery, mapping, and exploration as the world powers, particularly England and France, competed for control of the lucrative fur trade in the Mississippi valley. The French attempted to establish trade networks stretching from the Atlantic Ocean inland to the Mississippi River and northward from ports on the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River. But they found the British already entrenched there.

Verner Crane guides us through this multinational struggle and navigates the border wars and diplomatic intrigues that played crucial roles in the settlement of the South by Euro-Americans. In his new introduction, Steven Hahn places the work in the context of its time, sketches its publication history, and provides biographical information on Crane.

While the sovereign nation-state is considered the world’s political norm, millions of colonial subjects, immigrants, refugees, and native peoples appear to be without sovereignty. What claims have they to sovereignty? If they cannot ever constitute themselves into sovereign nation-states, are they out of the political game? Can a framework like sovereignty—used historically to exploit, dispossess, and even exterminate people—be a part of a struggle for political freedom?

Editor Frances Negrón-Muntaner and the contributors to Sovereign Acts engage in a debate around these questions with surprising results. Moving the idea of sovereignty beyond the narrow confines of the nation-state, beyond the concept of a power that one either has or lacks, this paradigm-­shifting work examines the multiple ways that Indigenous nations and U.S. territorial peoples act as sovereign and the possible limits of such sovereign acts within the current globalized context. A valuable contribution to the debate around indigenous and other conceptions of sovereignty, Sovereign Acts goes further than legal frameworks to investigate the relationships among sovereignty, gender, sexuality, representation, and the body.

From activist style and choreography to the politics of recognition, the scholars and artists featured in this unique volume map out how people disrupt modern notions of sovereignty, attempt to redefine what being sovereign means, or seek alternative political vocabularies. Sovereignty is not only, after all, a kingdom and a crown.

CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Lujan Bevacqua
Glen Coulthard
Jennifer Nez Denetdale
Adriana María Garriga-López
Jessica A. F. Harkins
Brian Klopotek
Davianna Pomaika‘i McGregor
Frances Negrón-Muntaner
Yasmin Ramírez
Mark Rifkin
Madeline Román
Stephanie Nohelani Teves
Fa‘anofo Lisaclaire Uperesa
 

Two-Spirit people, identified by many different tribally specific names and standings within their communities, have been living, loving, and creating art since time immemorial. It wasn’t until the 1970s, however, that contemporary queer Native literature gained any public notice. Even now, only a handful of books address it specifically, most notably the 1988 collection Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. Since that book’s publication twenty-three years ago, there has not been another collection published that focuses explicitly on the writing and art of Indigenous Two-Spirit and Queer people.

This landmark collection strives to reflect the complexity of identities within Native Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) communities. Gathering together the work of established writers and talented new voices, this anthology spans genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and essay) and themes (memory, history, sexuality, indigeneity, friendship, family, love, and loss) and represents a watershed moment in Native American and Indigenous literatures, Queer studies, and the intersections between the two.

Collaboratively, the pieces in Sovereign Erotics demonstrate not only the radical diversity among the voices of today’s Indigenous GLBTQ2 writers but also the beauty, strength, and resilience of Indigenous GLBTQ2 people in the twenty-first century.

Contributors: Indira Allegra, Louise Esme Cruz, Paula Gunn Allen, Qwo-Li Driskill, Laura Furlan, Janice Gould, Carrie House, Daniel Heath Justice, Maurice Kenny, Michael Koby, M. Carmen Lane, Jaynie Lara, Chip Livingston, Luna Maia, Janet McAdams, Deborah Miranda, Daniel David Moses, D. M. O’Brien, Malea Powell, Cheryl Savageau, Kim Shuck, Sarah Tsigeyu Sharp, James Thomas Stevens, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, William Raymond Taylor, Joel Waters, and Craig Womack

Sovereignty unfolds over two parallel timelines. In present-day Oklahoma, a young Cherokee lawyer, Sarah Ridge Polson, and her colleague Jim Ross defend the inherent jurisdiction of Cherokee Nation in the U.S. Supreme Court when a non-Indian defendant challenges the Nation’s authority to prosecute non-Indian perpetrators of domestic violence. Their collaboration is juxtaposed with scenes from 1835, when Cherokee Nation was eight hundred miles to the east in the southern Appalachians. That year, Sarah’s and Jim’s ancestors, historic Cherokee rivals, were bitterly divided over a proposed treaty with the administration of Andrew Jackson, the Treaty of New Echota, which led to the nation’s removal to Oklahoma on the infamous Trail of Tears.
 
A direct descendant of nineteenth-century Cherokee leaders John Ridge and Major Ridge, Mary Kathryn Nagle has penned a play that twists and turns from violent outbursts to healing monologues, illuminating a provocative double meaning for the sovereignty of both tribal territory and women’s bodies. Taking as its point of departure the story of one lawyer’s passionate defense of the rights of her people to prosecute non-natives who commit crimes on reservations, Sovereignty opens up into an expansive exploration of the circular continuity of history, human memory, and the power of human relationships.

Although American Indian poetry is widely read and discussed, few resources have been available that focus on it critically. This book is the first collection of essays on the genre, bringing poetry out from under the shadow of fiction in the study of Native American literature.

Speak to Me Words is a stimulating blend of classic articles and original pieces that reflect the energy of modern American Indian literary studies. Highlighting various aspects of poetry written by American Indians since the 1960s, it is a wide-ranging collection that balances the insights of Natives and non-Natives, men and women, old and new voices. Included here are such landmark articles as "Answering the Deer" by Paula Gunn Allen, "Herbs of Healing" by Carter Revard, and "Song, Poetry and Language—Expression and Perception" by Simon Ortiz—all pieces that have shaped how we think about Native poetry. Among the contributions appearing for the first time are Elaine Jahner writing on Paula Gunn Allen's use of formal structures; Robert Nelson addressing pan-Indian tropes of emergence, survival, return, and renewal; and Janet McAdams focusing on Carter Revard's "angled mirrors." Although many Native writers may disregard distinctions between genres, together these writings help readers see the difference between American Indian poetry and other forms of Native literature.

These essays are as broad, encompassing, and provocative as Native poetry itself, branching off from and weaving back into one another. In showing how American Indian poetry redefines our social order and articulates how Indian communities think about themselves, these writers establish a new foundation for the study—and enjoyment—of this vital art.

Now it is my turn to stand. At Acoma Pueblo meetings, members rise and announce their intention to speak. In that moment they are recognized and heard. In Speaking for the Generations, Acoma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz brings together contemporary Native American writers to take their turn. Each offers an evocation of herself or himself, describing the personal, social, and cultural influences on her or his development as a writer. Although each writer's viewpoint is personal and unique, together they reflect the rich tapestry of today's Native literature.

Of varied backgrounds, the writers represent Indian heritages and cultures from the Pacific Northwest to the northern plains, from Canada to Guatemala. They are poets, novelists, and playwrights. And although their backgrounds are different and their statements intensely personal, they share common themes of their relationship to the land, to their ancestors, and to future generations of their people. From Gloria Bird's powerful recounting of personal and family history to Esther Belin's vibrant tale of her urban Native homeland in Los Angeles, these writers reveal the importance of place and politics in their lives. Leslie Marmon Silko calls upon the ancient tradition of Native American storytelling and its role in connecting the people to the land. Roberta J. Hill and Elizabeth Woody ponder some of the absurdities of contemporary Native life, while Guatemalan Victor Montejo takes readers to the Mayan world, where a native culture had writing and books long before Europeans came.

Together these pieces offer an inspiring portrait of what it means to be a Native writer in the twentieth century. With passion and urgency, these writers are speaking for themselves, for their land, and for the generations.

“A lesson in how to practice recognizing the fundamental truth that every inch of the Americas is Indigenous territory” —Robert Warrior, from the Foreword

Many people learn about Indigenous politics only through the most controversial and confrontational news: the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s efforts to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, for instance, or the battle to protect Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, a site sacred to Native peoples. But most Indigenous activism remains unseen in the mainstream—and so, of course, does its significance. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui set out to change that with her radio program Indigenous Politics. Issue by issue, she interviewed people who talked candidly and in an engaging way about how settler colonialism depends on erasing Native peoples and about how Native peoples can and do resist. Collected here, these conversations speak with clear and compelling voices about a range of Indigenous politics that shape everyday life.

Land desecration, treaty rights, political status, cultural revitalization: these are among the themes taken up by a broad cross-section of interviewees from across the United States and from Canada, Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Australia, and New Zealand. Some speak from the thick of political action, some from a historical perspective, others from the reaches of Indigenous culture near and far. Writers, like Comanche Paul Chaat Smith, author of Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, expand on their work—about gaming and sovereignty, for example, or protecting Native graves, the reclamation of land, or the erasure of Indian identity. These conversations both inform and engage at a moment when their messages could not be more urgent.

Contributors: Jessie Little Doe Baird (Mashpee Wampanoag), Omar Barghouti, Lisa Brooks (Abenaki), Kathleen A. Brown-Pérez (Brothertown Indian Nation), Margaret “Marge” Bruchac (Abenaki), Jessica Cattelino, David Cornsilk (Cherokee Nation), Sarah Deer (Muskogee Creek Nation), Philip J. Deloria (Dakota), Tonya Gonnella Frichner (Onondaga Nation), Hone Harawira (Ngapuhi Nui Tonu), Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee), Rashid Khalidi, Winona LaDuke (White Earth Ojibwe), Maria LaHood, James Luna (Luiseño), Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Quandamooka), Chief Mutáwi Mutáhash (Many Hearts) Marilynn “Lynn” Malerba (Mohegan), Steven Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape), Jean M. O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe), Jonathan Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio (Kanaka Maoli), Steven Salaita, Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), Circe Sturm (Mississippi Choctaw descendant), Margo Taméz (Lipan Apache), Chief Richard Velky (Schaghticoke), Patrick Wolfe. 

Ten original essays focus on the rise, change, and persistence of the Native American reservation system. Contributors drawn from history, anthropology, sociology, and political science offer divergent points of view buttressed by historical and ethnographic case studies. Together, these articles suggest that the time has come—or is long overdue—to rethink the basic assumptions underlying Federal Indian policy.

CONTENTS
Introduction, George Pierre Castile & Robert L. Bee
Part I—Historical Foundations of the Reservation System
An Elusive Institution: The Meanings of Indian Reservations in Gold Rush California, John M. Findlay
Crow Leadership Amidst Reservation Oppression, Frederick E. Hoxie
Part II—The Nonreservation Experience
Utah Indians and the Homestead Laws, Martha C. Knack
The Enduring Reservations of Oklahoma, John H. Moore
Without Reservation: Federal Indian Policy and the Landless Tribes of Washington, Frank W. Porter, III
Part III—Power and Symbols
Riding the Paper Tiger, Robert L. Bee
Indian Sign: Hegemony and Symbolism in Federal Indian Policy, George P. Castile
Part IV—The Resource Base
Primitive Accumulation, Reservations, and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Lawrence Weiss & David C.Maas
Shortcomings of the Indian Self-Determination Policy, George S. Esber, Jr.
Getting to Yes in the New West: The Negotiation of Policy, Thomas R. McGuire

Explores the impact of European colonization on Native American and Pacific Islander technology and culture

This is the first comprehensive analysis of the partial replacement of flaked stone and ground stone traditions by metal tools in the Americas during the Contact Era. It examines the functional, symbolic, and economic consequences of that replacement on the lifeways of native populations, even as lithic technologies persisted well after the landing of Columbus. Ranging across North America and to Hawai'i, the studies show that, even with wide access to metal objects, Native Americans continued to produce certain stone tool types—perhaps because they were still the best implements for a task or because they represented a deep commitment to a traditional practice.

Chapters are ordered in terms of relative degree of European contact, beginning with groups that experienced brief episodes of interaction, such as the Wichita-French meeting on the Arkansas River, and ending with societies that were heavily influenced by colonization, such as the Potawatomi of Illinois. Because the anthology draws comparisons between the persistence of stone tools and the continuity of other indigenous crafts, it presents holistic models that can be used to explain the larger consequences of the Contact Era.

Marvin T. Smith, of Valdosta State University has stated that, “after reading this volume, no archaeologist will ever see the replacement of lithic technology by metal tools as a simple matter of replacement of technologically inferior stone tools with their superior metal counterparts. This is cutting-edge scholarship in the area of contact period studies.”


 

Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain (1903) and Lost Borders (1909), both set in the California desert, make intimate connections between animals, people, and the land they inhabit. For Austin, the two indispensable conditions of her fiction were that the region must enter the story "as another character, as the instigator of plot," and that the story must reflect "the essential qualities of the land."

In The Land of Little Rain, Austin's attention to natural detail allows her to write prose that is geologically, biologically, and botanically accurate at the same time that it offers metaphorical insight into human emotional and spiritual experience. In Lost Borders, Austin focuses on both white and Indian women's experiences in the desert, looks for the sources of their deprivation, and finds them in the ways life betrays them, usually in the guise of men. She offers several portraits of strong women characters but ultimately identifies herself with the desert, which she personifies as a woman.

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
 

Within the general structure-and-process theme of this compendium, the authors have focused on either intrasite problems (those dealing with the formation and structure of a site, type of site, or type of feature) or intersite problems (those dealing with behavioral organization and process as developed from comparative site data). These papers, from a broad range of specialists, present a comprehensive study of southeastern archaeology.

Section I: Intrasite Structure and Formation Processes

Formation Processes for the Practical Prehistorian: An Example from the Southeast, J. Jefferson Reid

The Form, Function, and Formation of Garbage-filled Pits on Southeastern Aboriginal Sites: An Archaeobotanical Analysis, Roy S. Dickens Jr.

Feature Zones and Feature Fill: More Than Trash, Jack H. Wilson Jr.

Social Implications of Storage and Disposal Patterns, H. Trawick Ward

The Form and Function of South Carolina's Early Woodland Shell Rings, Michael B. Trinkley

A New Way of Looking at Old Holes: Methods for Excavating and Interpreting Timber Structures, Alexander H. Morrison II

Section II: Intersite Comparisons and Regional Chronology

Archaeology and the Archaic Period in the Southern Ridge-and-Valley Province, Jefferson Chapman

Intersite Assemblage Variability in the Lower Little Tennessee River Valley: Exploring Extinct Settlement Systems Through Probabilistic Sampling, R. P. Stephen Davis Jr.

Lithic Scatters in the South Carolina Piedmont, Veletta Canouts and Albert C. Goodyear III

Tradition and Typology: Basic Elements of the Carolina Projectile Point Sequence, Billy L. Oliver

Model and Sequence in the Maryland Archaic, Kit W. Wesler

Spheres of Cultural Interaction across the Coastal Plain of Virginia in the Woodland Period, Keith T. Egloff

Early Hopewellian Ceremonial Encampments in the South Appalachian Highlands, John A. Walthall

Deep Water and High Ground: Seventeenth-Century Settlement Patterns on the Carolina Coast, Stanley South and Michael O. Hartley

Epilogue: Joffre Lanning Coe: The Quiet Giant of Southeastern Archaeology, James B. Griffin

In 1733, General James Edward Oglethorpe officially established the colony of Georgia, and within three years had fortified the coast southward toward St. Augustine.  Although this region, originally known as the provinces of Guale and Mocama, had previously been under Spanish control for more than a century, territorial fighting had emptied the region of Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and their Indian allies.  Spanish officials maintained that the long history of Spanish authority over the territory guaranteed Spain the right to defy and repel the English intruders.  By 1739, with diplomatic negotiations failing and the potential for war imminent, King Philip V requested that Don Manuel de Montiano, Governor of Spanish Florida, provide him with every document from both governmental and ecclesiastical sources that would demonstrate prior Spanish presence and control over the region.  Original documents and translations were delivered within the year and safely filed for future use--then forgotten.  With the outbreak of open war six months earlier, the diplomatic utility of the documents had passed.

For over 250 years, the documents languished safely in the Archive of the Indies in Seville until recognized, recovered, translated, and published by John Worth.  Within this volume, Worth brings to light the history of the documents, provides complete translations and full explanations of their contents and a narrative exposition of the Spanish presence along the Atlantic coast never before fully understood.  David Hurst Thomas provides an introduction that places Worth's translations and his historical overview into the context of ongoing archaeological excavations on the Georgia coast.  With the publication of this volume, one of the least known chapters of Georgia history is finally examined in detail.

This classic compendium of ancient Indian artifacts from the entire southeastern United States remains an indispensable reference source for professionals and enthusiasts alike.

From utilitarian arrowheads to beautiful stone effigy pipes to ornately-carved shell disks, the photographs and drawings in Sun Circles and Human Hands present the archaeological record of the art and native crafts of the prehistoric southeastern Indians. Painstakingly compiled in the 1950s by two sisters who traveled the eastern United States interviewing archaeologists and collectors and visiting the major repositories, Sun Circles and Human Hands is remarkable for its breadth of illustration of Indian-made artifacts and its comprehensive documentation. Although research over the last 50 years has disproven many of the early theories reported in the text—which were not the editors' theories but those of the archaeologists of the day—the excellent illustrations of objects no longer available for examination have more than validated the lasting worth of this popular book.

Broadly acclaimed when it first appeared, this new printing has the added value of Knight's foreword, which places the work in its proper context. Useful to museums, state and national parks, school libraries, gift stores, archaeological agencies, and private collections, Sun Circles and Human Hands is a rich pictorial survey accessible to anyone interested in early American Indian culture.

With over 24,000 copies in print, this bestselling book tells how the Paiutes survived in the harsh Nevada climate. Chronicling food-gathering methods, basket weaving, hunting, skinning, and working with rabbit skins, this book serves as an invaluable reference on early Paiute culture. Any inquiring person who has worked with the Native Americans of the West will testify to the difficulties of obtaining the information he seeks. They are an old and proud and reserved race, and acceptance of outsiders is not freely given. In her twenty years of painstaking work with the Northern Paiutes, Margaret Wheat earned that full measure of acceptance. She tells the story of the generation of Native Americans whose lives were changed forever by the arrival of pioneers and prospectors in 1849.

In the late 1960s, Indian families in Minneapolis and St. Paul were under siege. Clyde Bellecourt remembers, “We were losing our children during this time; juvenile courts were sweeping our children up, and they were fostering them out, and sometimes whole families were being broken up.” In 1972, motivated by prejudice in the child welfare system and hostility in the public schools, American Indian Movement (AIM) organizers and local Native parents came together to start their own community school. For Pat Bellanger, it was about cultural survival. Though established in a moment of crisis, the school fulfilled a goal that she had worked toward for years: to create an educational system that would enable Native children “never to forget who they were.”

While AIM is best known for its national protests and political demands, the survival schools foreground the movement’s local and regional engagement with issues of language, culture, spirituality, and identity. In telling of the evolution and impact of the Heart of the Earth school in Minneapolis and the Red School House in St. Paul, Julie L. Davis explains how the survival schools emerged out of AIM’s local activism in education, child welfare, and juvenile justice and its efforts to achieve self-determination over urban Indian institutions. The schools provided informal, supportive, culturally relevant learning environments for students who had struggled in the public schools. Survival school classes, for example, were often conducted with students and instructors seated together in a circle, which signified the concept of mutual human respect. Davis reveals how the survival schools contributed to the global movement for Indigenous decolonization as they helped Indian youth and their families to reclaim their cultural identities and build a distinctive Native community.

The story of these schools, unfolding here through the voices of activists, teachers, parents, and students, is also an in-depth history of AIM’s founding and early community organizing in the Twin Cities—and evidence of its long-term effect on Indian people’s lives.

Assesses Woodland Period interactions using technofunctional, mineralogical, and chemical data derived from Swift Creek Complicated Stamped sherds

A unique dataset for studying past social interactions comes from Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery that linked sites throughout much of the Eastern Woodlands but that was primarily distributed over the lower Southeast. Although connections have been demonstrated, their significance has remained enigmatic. How and why were apparently utilitarian vessels, or the wooden tools used to make them, distributed widely across the landscape?