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Aazheyaadizi
Worldview, Language, and the Logics of Decolonization
Mark D. Freeland
Michigan State University Press, 2020
Many of the English translations of Indigenous languages that we commonly use today have been handed down from colonial missionaries whose intent was to fundamentally alter or destroy prior Indigenous knowledge and praxis. In this text, author Mark D. Freeland develops a theory of worldview that provides an interrelated logical mooring to shed light on the issues around translating Indigenous languages in and out of colonial languages. In tandem with other linguistic and narrative methods, this theory of worldview can be employed to help root out the reproduction of colonial culture in Indigenous languages and can be a useful addition to the repertoire of tools needed to return to life-giving relationships with our environment. These issues of decolonization are highlighted in the trajectory of treaty language associated with relationships to land and their present-day importance. This book uses the 1836 Treaty of Washington and its contemporary manifestation in Great Lakes fishing rights and the State of Michigan’s 2007 Inland Consent Decree as a means of identifying the role of worldview in deciphering the logics embedded in Anishinaabe thought associated with these relationships to land. A fascinating study for students of Indigenous and linguistic disciplines, this book deftly demonstrates the significance of worldview theory in relation to the logics of decolonization of Indigenous thought and praxis.
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Abalone Tales
Collaborative Explorations of Sovereignty and Identity in Native California
Les W. Field
Duke University Press, 2008
For Native peoples of California, the abalone found along the state’s coast have remarkably complex significance as food, spirit, narrative symbol, tradable commodity, and material with which to make adornment and sacred regalia. The large mollusks also represent contemporary struggles surrounding cultural identity and political sovereignty. Abalone Tales, a collaborative ethnography, presents different perspectives on the multifaceted material and symbolic relationships between abalone and the Ohlone, Pomo, Karuk, Hupa, and Wiyot peoples of California. The research agenda, analyses, and writing strategies were determined through collaborative relationships between the anthropologist Les W. Field and Native individuals and communities. Several of these individuals contributed written texts or oral stories for inclusion in the book.

Tales about abalone and their historical and contemporary meanings are related by Field and his coauthors, who include the chair and other members of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe; a Point Arena Pomo elder; the chair of the Wiyot tribe and her sister; several Hupa Indians; and a Karuk scholar, artist, and performer. Reflecting the divergent perspectives of various Native groups and people, the stories and analyses belie any presumption of a single, unified indigenous understanding of abalone. At the same time, they shed light on abalone’s role in cultural revitalization, struggles over territory, tribal appeals for federal recognition, and connections among California’s Native groups. While California’s abalone are in danger of extinction, their symbolic power appears to surpass even the environmental crises affecting the state’s vulnerable coastline.

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Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada
Historical and Legal Aspects
Kerry Abel
University of Manitoba Press, 1991

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Aby Warburg and America
The Art Historian as Ethnographer
Horst Bredekamp
Bard Graduate Center, 2021
To a greater extent than still widely assumed, the German scholar Aby Warburg drew, throughout his life, on the lessons of two of its early episodes: his travels of 1895–96 among Pueblo Indian communities in the North American Southwest, and his residence of 1896–97 in Berlin, which he prized as a center for the study of ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology. Over the next three decades, this pioneering thinker was able to affect a fruitful amalgamation of those disciplines with that of art history (in which he had himself been trained): the origin of a form of cultural studies that continues to exert an extraordinary intellectual allure. Quoting from Warburg’s diaries, notebooks, and correspondence, this newly translated study throws fresh light on a most eventful journey through the realm of ideas.
 
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Accomplishing NAGPRA
Perspectives on the Intent, Impact, and Future of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
Sangita Chari and Jaime M. N. Lavallee
Oregon State University Press, 2013
Accomplishing NAGPRA reveals the day-to-day reality of implementing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The diverse contributors to this timely volume reflect the viewpoints of tribes, museums, federal agencies, attorneys, academics, and others invested in the landmark act.

NAGPRA requires museums and federal agencies to return requested Native American cultural items to lineal descendants, culturally affiliated Indian tribes, and Native Hawai’ian organizations.  Since the 1990 passage of the act, museums and federal agencies have made more than one million cultural items—and the remains of nearly forty thousand Native Americans—available for repatriation.

Drawing on case studies, personal reflections, historical documents, and statistics, the volume examines NAGPRA and its grassroots, practical application throughout the United States.? Accomplishing NAGPRA will appeal to professionals and academics with an interest in cultural resource management, Indian and human rights law, Indigenous studies, social justice movements, and public policy.
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Africans and Native Americans
The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples
Jack D. Forbes
University of Illinois Press, 1993
Jack D. Forbes's monumental Africans and Native Americans has become a canonical text in the study of relations between the two groups. Forbes explores key issues relating to the evolution of racial terminology and European colonialists' perceptions of color, analyzing the development of color classification systems and the specific evolution of key terms such as black, mulatto, and mestizo--terms that no longer carry their original meanings. Forbes also presents strong evidence that Native American and African contacts began in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean.
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After King Philip’s War
Presence and Persistence in Indian New England
Edited by Colin G. Calloway
Dartmouth College Press, 1997
The 1676 killing of Metacomet, the tribal leader dubbed "King Philip" by colonists, is commonly seen as a watershed event, marking the end of a bloody war, dissolution of Indian society in New England, and even the disappearance of Native peoples from the region. This collection challenges that assumption, showing that Indians adapted and survived, existing quietly on the fringes of Yankee society, less visible than before but nonetheless retaining a distinct identity and heritage. While confinement on tiny reservations, subjection to increasing state regulation, enforced abandonment of traditional dress and means of support, and racist policies did cause dramatic changes, Natives nonetheless managed to maintain their Indianness through customs, kinship, and community.
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After Wounded Knee
Correspondence of Major and Surgeon John Vance Lauderdale while Serving with the Army Occupying the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 1890-1891
Jerry Green
Michigan State University Press, 1996

The Wounded Knee Massacre of December 29, 1890, known to U.S. military historians as the last battle in "the Indian Wars," was in reality another tragic event in a larger pattern of conquest, destruction, killing, and broken promises that continue to this day.
     On a cold winter's morning more than a century ago, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry attacked and killed more than 260 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. In the aftermath, the broken, twisted bodies of the Lakota people were soon covered by a blanket of snow, as a blizzard swept through the countryside. A few days later, veteran army surgeon John Vance Lauderdale arrived for duty at the nearby Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Shocked by what he encountered, he wrote numerous letters to his closest family members detailing the events, aftermath, and daily life on the Reservation under military occupation. He also treated the wounded, both Cavalry soldiers and Lakota civilians. What distinguishes After Wounded Knee from the large body of literature already available on the massacre is Lauderdale's frank appraisals of military life and a personal observation of the tragedy, untainted by self-serving reminiscence or embellished newspaper and political reports. His sense of frustration and outrage toward the military command, especially concerning the tactics used against the Lakota, is vividly apparent in this intimate view of Lauderdale's life. His correspondence provides new insight into a familiar subject and was written at the height of the cultural struggle between the U.S. and Lakota people. Jerry Green's careful editing of this substantial collection, part of the John Vance Lauderdale Papers in the Western Americana Collection in Yale University's Beinecke Library, clarifies Lauderdale's experiences at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

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Afterlives of Indigenous Archives
Edited by Ivy Schweitzer and Gordon Henry
Dartmouth College Press, 2019
Afterlives of Indigenous Archives offers a compelling critique of Western archives and their use in the development of “digital humanities.” The essays collected here present the work of an international and interdisciplinary group of indigenous scholars; researchers in the field of indigenous studies and early American studies; and librarians, curators, activists, and storytellers. The contributors examine various digital projects and outline their relevance to the lives and interests of tribal people and communities, along with the transformative power that access to online materials affords. The authors aim to empower native people to re-envision the Western archive as a site of community-based practices for cultural preservation, one that can offer indigenous perspectives and new technological applications for the imaginative reconstruction of the tribal past, the repatriation of the tribal memories, and a powerful vision for an indigenous future. This important and timely collection will appeal to archivists and indigenous studies scholars alike.
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Against Extraction
Indigenous Modernism in the Twin Cities
Matt Hooley
Duke University Press, 2024
In Against Extraction Matt Hooley traces a modern tradition of Ojibwe invention in Minneapolis and St. Paul from the mid-nineteenth century to the present as that tradition emerges in response to the cultural legacies of US colonialism. Hooley shows how Indigenous literary and visual art modernisms challenge the strictures of everyday life and question the ecological, political, and cultural fantasies that make multivalent US colonialism seem inevitable. Hooley analyzes literature and art by Louise Erdrich, William Whipple Warren, David Treuer, George Morrison, and Gerald Vizenor in relation to histories of Indigenous dispossession and occupation, enslavement and Black life, and environmental harm and care. He shows that historical narratives of these cities are intimately bound up with the violence of colonial systems of extraction and that concepts like Indigeneity and sovereignty extend beyond treaty-granted promises of political control. These works, created in opposition and proximity to the extraction of cultural, political, and territorial resources, demonstrate how Indigenous claims to life and land matter to rethinking and unmaking the social and ecological devastations of the colonial world.
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Águila
The Vision, Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Two-Spirit Shaman in the Ozark Mountains
María Cristina Moroles
University of Arkansas Press, 2024
In Águila: The Vision, Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Two-Spirit Shaman in the Ozark Mountains, María Cristina Moroles traces the path of her extraordinary life from the streets of Dallas to the wilderness of the Arkansas Ozarks, where she has resided for fifty years. Hailing from a large Indigenous and Mexican American family in Texas, Moroles apprentices herself to healers and shamans across the Americas as she follows the spiritual vision that leads her to establish a mountaintop sanctuary for women and children of color in a notoriously insular location in the Ozark Mountains. This is a survivor’s tale, and a back-to-the-lander’s tale, unlike any other. From early traumas to countercultural rebellion and profound spiritual awakening, Moroles recounts milestones that earn her the ceremonial names SunHawk and Águila, as she builds a sustainable community off the grid, atop a mountain otherwise uninhabited by human life. Águila tells the truth of one woman’s search for freedom and all women’s quest for dignity as it celebrates the healing powers of nature.
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The Alaska Native Reader
History, Culture, Politics
Maria Shaa Tláa Williams, ed.
Duke University Press, 2009
Alaska is home to more than two hundred federally recognized tribes. Yet the long histories and diverse cultures of Alaska’s first peoples are often ignored, while the stories of Russian fur hunters and American gold miners, of salmon canneries and oil pipelines, are praised. Filled with essays, poems, songs, stories, maps, and visual art, this volume foregrounds the perspectives of Alaska Native people, from a Tlingit photographer to Athabascan and Yup’ik linguists, and from an Alutiiq mask carver to a prominent Native politician and member of Alaska’s House of Representatives. The contributors, most of whom are Alaska Natives, include scholars, political leaders, activists, and artists. The majority of the pieces in The Alaska Native Reader were written especially for the volume, while several were translated from Native languages.

The Alaska Native Reader describes indigenous worldviews, languages, arts, and other cultural traditions as well as contemporary efforts to preserve them. Several pieces examine Alaska Natives’ experiences of and resistance to Russian and American colonialism; some of these address land claims, self-determination, and sovereignty. Some essays discuss contemporary Alaska Native literature, indigenous philosophical and spiritual tenets, and the ways that Native peoples are represented in the media. Others take up such diverse topics as the use of digital technologies to document Native cultures, planning systems that have enabled indigenous communities to survive in the Arctic for thousands of years, and a project to accurately represent Dena’ina heritage in and around Anchorage. Fourteen of the volume’s many illustrations appear in color, including work by the contemporary artists Subhankar Banerjee, Perry Eaton, Erica Lord, and Larry McNeil.

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All My Relatives
Community in Contemporary Ethnic American Literatures
Bonnie TuSmith
University of Michigan Press, 1994
All My Relatives challenges the prevailing notion that the work of all American writers reflects a sense of determined individualism. Highlighting works by Frank Chin, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, N. Scott Momaday, Tomas Rivera, Leslie Marmon Silko, Alice Walker, and John Edgar Wideman, Bonnie TuSmith shows that a "first language of community" exists within the cultures of ethnic Americans and is evident in their literary texts. TuSmith suggests that the proper understanding of these texts demands that we dismiss an interpretive frame borrowed from European-American literature.
All My Relatives provides a new way of reading popular works such as The Woman Warrior, The Joy Luck Club, The Color Purple and John Edgar Wideman's Sent for You Yesterday. TuSmith's study will appeal to general readers as well as students and scholars of American culture, ethnic studies, and American literature.
"An original contribution to the field. TuSmith's willingness to step over invisible boundaries and to draw parallels between the cultural contexts of several ethnic groups at once is refreshing and important." --Amy Ling, University of Wisconsin, Madison
"Ambitious and timely . . . a significant work that Americanists will want to read. TuSmith does an excellent job of clarifying the meaning and significance of the term "ethnicity" in relation to American literature."--Ramón Saldívar, Stanford University
". . . TuSmith establishes the importance of traditional (usually oral) modes of expression to ethnic texts that are both relational and accessible . . . . [S]hould become a standard point of reference in the emerging field of comparative American literature."--Choice
Bonnie TuSmith is Assistant Professor of English, Bowling Green State University.
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American Indian Activism
ALCATRAZ TO THE LONGEST WALK
Edited by Troy Johnson; Joane Nagel; and Duane Champagne
University of Illinois Press, 1997
The American Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island was the catalyst for a more generalized movement in which Native Americans from across the country have sought redress of grievances, attempting to right the many wrongs committed against them.
In this volume, some of the dominant scholars in the field chronicle and analyze Native American activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Much of what is included here began as a special issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal; the introduction has been extensively modified and one chapter deleted. Importantly, the new first chapter provides extended background and historical analysis of the Alcatraz takeover and discusses its place in contemporary Indian activism.
Contributors include: Karren Baird-Olson, LaNada Boyer, Edward D. Castillo, Duane Champagne, Ward Churchill, Vine Deloria, Jr., Tim Findley, Jack D. Forbes, Adam (Nordwall) Fortunate Eagle, Lenny Foster, John Garvey, George P. Horse Capture, Troy Johnson, Luis S. Kemnitzer, Woody Kipp, Joane Nagel, Robert A. Rundstrom, Steve Talbot
 
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American Indian Constitutional Reform and the Rebuilding of Native Nations
Edited by Eric D. Lemont
University of Texas Press, 2006

Since 1975, when the U.S. government adopted a policy of self-determination for American Indian nations, a large number of the 562 federally recognized nations have seized the opportunity to govern themselves and determine their own economic, political, and cultural futures. As a first and crucial step in this process, many nations are revising constitutions originally developed by the U.S. government to create governmental structures more attuned to native people's unique cultural and political values. These new constitutions and the governing institutions they create are fostering greater governmental stability and accountability, increasing citizen support of government, and providing a firmer foundation for economic and political development.

This book brings together for the first time the writings of tribal reform leaders, academics, and legal practitioners to offer a comprehensive overview of American Indian nations' constitutional reform processes and the rebuilding of native nations. The book is organized in three sections. The first part investigates the historical, cultural, economic, and political motivations behind American Indian nations' recent reform efforts. The second part examines the most significant areas of reform, including criteria for tribal membership/citizenship and the reform of governmental institutions. The book concludes with a discussion of how American Indian nations are navigating the process of reform, including overcoming the politics of reform, maximizing citizen participation, and developing short-term and long-term programs of civic education.

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American Indian Educators in Reservation Schools
Terry Huffman
University of Nevada Press, 2014
The role of Native American teachers and administrators working in reservation schools has received little attention from scholars. Utilizing numerous interviews and extensive fieldwork, Terry Huffman shows how they define their roles and judge their achievements. He examines the ways they address the complex issues of cultural identity that affect their students and themselves and how they cope with the pressures of teaching disadvantaged students while meeting the requirements for reservation schools. Personal accounts from the educators enrich the discussion. Their candid comments about their choice of profession; their position as teachers, role models, and social service agents; and the sometimes harsh realities of reservation life offer unique insight into the challenges and rewards of providing an education to Native American students. Huffman also considers the changing role of Native educators as reservation schools prepare their students for the increasing complexities of modern life and society while still transmitting traditional culture. He shows that Native American educators meet daunting challenges with enduring optimism and persistence. The insights these educators offer can serve those in other communities where students navigate a difficult path out of discrimination and poverty.
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American Indian Languages
Cultural and Social Contexts
Shirley Silver and Wick R. Miller
University of Arizona Press, 1997
This comprehensive survey of indigenous languages of the New World introduces students and general readers to the mosaic of American Indian languages and cultures and offers an approach to grasping their subtleties.

Authors Silver and Miller demonstrate the complexity and diversity of these languages while dispelling popular misconceptions. Their text reveals the linguistic richness of languages found throughout the Americas, emphasizing those located in the western United States and Mexico, while drawing on a wide range of other examples found from Canada to the Andes. It introduces readers to such varied aspects of communicating as directionals and counting systems, storytelling, expressive speech, Mexican Kickapoo whistle speech, and Plains sign language.

The authors have included basics of grammar and historical linguistics, while emphasizing such issues as speech genres and other sociolinguistic issues and the relation between language and worldview. They have incorporated a variety of data that have rarely or never received attention in nontechnical literature in order to underscore the linguistic diversity of the Americas, and have provided more extensive language classification lists than are found in most other texts.

American Indian Languages: Cultural and Social Contexts is a comprehensive resource that will serve as a text in undergraduate and lower-level graduate courses on Native American languages and provide a useful reference for students of American Indian literature or general linguistics. It also introduces general readers interested in Native Americans to the amazing diversity and richness of indigenous American languages.

Coverage includes:

Achumawi, Acoma, Algonquin, Apache, Araucanian, Arawakan, Athapascan, Atsugewi, Ayamara, Bacairi, Bella Coola, Beothuk, Biloxi, Blackfoot, Caddoan, Cahto, Cahuilla, Cakchiquel, Carib, Cayuga, Chemehuevi, Cherokee, Chibchan, Chichimec, Chimakuan, Chimariko, Chinook, Chipewyan, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Chol, Cocopa, Coeur d'Alene, Comanche, Coos, Cora, Cree, Creek, Crow, Cubeo, Cupeño, Dakota, Delaware, Diegueño, Eskimo-Aleut, Esselen, Eyak, Fox, Gros Ventre, Guaraní, Guarijío, Haida, Havasupai, Hill Patwin, Hopi, Huastec, Huave, Hupa, Inuit-Inupiaq, Iroquois, Jaqaru, Je, Jicaque, Kalapuyan, Kamia, Karankawas, Karuk, Kashaya, Keres, Kickapoo, Kiliwa, Kiowa-Tanoan, Koasati, Konkow, Kuna, Kwakiutl, Kwalhioqua-Tlatskanai, Lakota, Lenca, Luiseño, Maidu, Mapuche, Markoosie, Mayan, Mazahua, Mazatec, Métis, Mexica, Micmac, Misumalpan, Mitchif, Miwok, Mixe-Zoquean, Mixtec, Mobilian, Mohave, Mohawk, Muskogean, Nahuatl, Natchez, Navajo, Nez Perce, Nheengatú, Nicola, Nomlaki, Nootka, Ojibwa, Oneida, O'odham, Otomí, Paiute, Palaihnihan, Panamint, Panoan, Paya, Pima, Pipil, Pomo, Poplocan, Pueblo, Puquina, Purpecha, Quechua, Quiché, Quileute, Sahaptian, Salish, Seneca, Sequoyah, Seri, Serrano, Shasta, Shoshoni, Sioux, Sirenikski, Slavey, Subtiaba-Tlapanec, Taíno, Takelma, Tanaina, Tarahumara, Tequistlatecan, Tewa, Tlingit, Toba, Toltec, Totonac, Tsimshian, Tubatulabal, Tukano, Tunica, Tupí, Ute, Uto-Aztecan, Vaupés, Venture¤o, Wakashan, Walapai, Wappo, Washo, Wintu, Wiyot, Xinca, Yahi, Yana, Yokuts, Yucatec, Yuchi, Yuki, Yuma, Yurok, Zapotec, Zoquean, and Zuni.
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American Indian Life Skills Development Curriculum
Teresa D. LaFromboise
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996

    Suicide is a significant problem for many adolescents in Native American Indian populations. American Indian Life Skills Development Curriculum is a course for high school students and some middle school students that is designed to drastically reduce suicidal thinking and behavior.
     Created in collaboration with students and community members from the Zuni Pueblo and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, this curriculum addresses key issues in Native American Indian adolescents’ lives and teaches such life skills as communication, problem solving, depression and stress management, anger regulation, and goal setting. The course is unique in its skills-based approach. After first increasing awareness and knowledge of suicide, it then teaches students specific methods to help a peer turn away from suicidal thinking and seek help from an appropriate help-giver.
     The skills-based approach of this curriculum follows well-established teaching methods to develop social skills. Teachers and peers inform students of the rationale and components of a particular skill, model and demonstrate the skill for them, and later provide feedback on individual skill performance.

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American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism
The Middle Place
Joni Adamson
University of Arizona Press, 2001
Although much contemporary American Indian literature examines the relationship between humans and the land, most Native authors do not set their work in the "pristine wilderness" celebrated by mainstream nature writers. Instead, they focus on settings such as reservations, open-pit mines, and contested borderlands. Drawing on her own teaching experience among Native Americans and on lessons learned from such recent scenes of confrontation as Chiapas and Black Mesa, Joni Adamson explores why what counts as "nature" is often very different for multicultural writers and activist groups than it is for mainstream environmentalists.

This powerful book is one of the first to examine the intersections between literature and the environment from the perspective of the oppressions of race, class, gender, and nature, and the first to review American Indian literature from the standpoint of environmental justice and ecocriticism. By examining such texts as Sherman Alexie's short stories and Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead, Adamson contends that these works, in addition to being literary, are examples of ecological criticism that expand Euro-American concepts of nature and place.

Adamson shows that when we begin exploring the differences that shape diverse cultural and literary representations of nature, we discover the challenge they present to mainstream American culture, environmentalism, and literature. By comparing the work of Native authors such as Simon Ortiz with that of environmental writers such as Edward Abbey, she reveals opportunities for more multicultural conceptions of nature and the environment.

More than a work of literary criticism, this is a book about the search to find ways to understand our cultural and historical differences and similarities in order to arrive at a better agreement of what the human role in nature is and should be. It exposes the blind spots in early ecocriticism and shows the possibilities for building common ground— a middle place— where writers, scholars, teachers, and environmentalists might come together to work for social and environmental change.
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American Indian Medicine Ways
Spiritual Power, Prophets, and Healing
Edited by Clifford E. Trafzer
University of Arizona Press, 2017
Indigenous people of wisdom have offered prayers of power, protection, and healing since the dawn of time. From Wovoka, the Ghost Dance prophet, to contemporary healer Kenneth Coosewoon, medicine people have called on the spiritual world to help humans in their relationships with each other and the natural world. Many American Indians—past and present—have had the ability to use power to access wisdom, knowledge, and spiritual understanding.

This groundbreaking collection provides fascinating stories of wisdom, spiritual power, and forces within tribal communities that have influenced the past and may influence the future. Through discussions of omens, prophecies, war, peace, ceremony, ritual, and cultural items such as masks, prayer sticks, sweat lodges, and peyote, this volume offers examples of the ways in which Native American beliefs in spirits have been and remain a fundamental aspect of history and culture. Drawing from written and oral sources, the book offers readers a greater understanding of creation narratives, oral histories, and songs that speak of healers, spirits, and power from tribes across the North American continent.

American Indian medicine ways and spiritual power remain vital today. With the help of spirits, people can heal the sick, protect communities from natural disasters, and mediate power of many kinds between the spiritual and corporeal worlds. As the contributors to this volume illustrate, healers are the connective cloth between the ancient past and the present, and their influence is significant for future generations.

CONTRIBUTORS

R. David Edmunds
Joseph B. Herring
Benjamin Jenkins
Troy R. Johnson
Michelle Lorimer
L. G. Moses
Richard D. Scheuerman
Al Logan Slagle
Clifford E. Trafzer
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American Indian Persistence and Resurgence
Karl Kroeber
Duke University Press, 1994
This collection celebrates the resurgence of Native Americans within the cultural landscape of the United States. During the past quarter century, the Native American population in the United States has seen an astonishing demographic growth reaching beyond all biological probability as increasing numbers of Americans desire to admit or to claim Native American ancestry. This volume illustrates a unique moment in history, as unprecedented numbers of Native Americans seek to create a powerful, flexible sense of cultural identity.
Diverse commentators, including literary critics, anthropologists, ethnohistorians, poets and a novelist address persistent issues facing Native Americans and Native American studies today. The future of White-Indian relation, the viability of Pan-Indianism, tensions between Native Americans and North American anthropologists, and new devlopments in ethnohistory are among the topics discussed. The survival of Native Americans as recorded in this collection, an expanded edition of a special issue of boundary 2, brings into focus the dynamically adaptive values of Native American culture. Native Americans’ persistence in U.S. culture—not disappearing under the pressure to assimilate or through genocidal warfare—reminds us of the extent to which any living culture is defined by the process of transformation.

Contributors. Linda Ainsworth, Jonathan Boyarin, Raymomd J. DeMallie, Elaine Jahner, Karl Kroeber, William Overstreet, Douglas R. Parks, Katharine Pearce, Jarold Ramsey, Wendy Rose, Edward H. Spicer, Gerald Vizenor, Priscilla Wald

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American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court
The Masking of Justice
By David E. Wilkins
University of Texas Press, 1997

"Like the miner's canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith," wrote Felix S. Cohen, an early expert in Indian legal affairs.

In this book, David Wilkins charts the "fall in our democratic faith" through fifteen landmark cases in which the Supreme Court significantly curtailed Indian rights. He offers compelling evidence that Supreme Court justices selectively used precedents and facts, both historical and contemporary, to arrive at decisions that have undermined tribal sovereignty, legitimated massive tribal land losses, sanctioned the diminishment of Indian religious rights, and curtailed other rights as well.

These case studies—and their implications for all minority groups—make important and troubling reading at a time when the Supreme Court is at the vortex of political and moral developments that are redefining the nature of American government, transforming the relationship between the legal and political branches, and altering the very meaning of federalism.

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American Indians
William T. Hagan
University of Chicago Press, 1993
William Hagan's concise account of Indian-white relations has become one of the standard histories of the subject. For this third edition, Hagan has updated information throughout the book and added a new chapter, "Domestic, Dependent Nations," in which he discusses developments in Native American life in the 1970s and 1980s. In his new bibliographic essay, Hagan surveys recent research and offers suggestions for further reading.

"The author has reduced the long story—often as tangled as a five-year-old's fishing line—into a brief, clear, and highly interesting book. . . . A remarkable achievement."—San Francisco Chronicle

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The American Indians
Edward H. Spicer
Harvard University Press, 1982

The monumental Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups is the most authoritative single source available on the history, culture, and distinctive characteristics of ethnic groups in the United States. The Dimensions of Ethnicity series is designed to make this landmark scholarship available to everyone in a series of handy paperbound student editions. Selections in this series will include outstanding articles that illuminate the social dynamics of a pluralistic nation or masterfully summarize the experience of key groups. Written by the best-qualified scholars in each field, Dimensions of Ethnicity titles reflect the complex interplay between assimilation and pluralism that is a central theme of the American experience.

Here is a notably compact account of the diversity and complex cultures of Native Americans, with a special section on the history of federal policy.

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American Indians, American Justice
By Vine Deloria, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle
University of Texas Press, 1983

Baffled by the stereotypes presented by Hollywood and much historical fiction, many other Americans find the contemporary American Indian an enigma. Compounding their confusion is the highly publicized struggle of the contemporary Indian for self-determination, lost land, cultural preservation, and fundamental human rights—a struggle dramatized both by public acts of protest and by precedent-setting legal actions. More and more, the battles of American Indians are fought—and won—in the political arena and the courts.

American Indians, American Justice explores the complexities of the present Indian situation, particularly with regard to legal and political rights. It is the first book to present an overview of federal Indian law in language readably accessible to the layperson. Remarkably comprehensive, it is destined to become a standard sourcebook for all concerned with the plight of the contemporary Indian.

Beginning with an examination of the historical relationship of Indians and the courts, the authors describe how tribal courts developed and operate today, and how they relate to federal and state governments. They define such key legal concepts as tribal sovereignty and Indian Country. By comparing and contrasting the workings of Indian and non-Indian legal institutions, the authors illustrate how Indian tribes have adapted their customs, values, and institutions to the demands of the modern world. Describing the activities of attorneys and Indian advocates in asserting and defending Indian rights, they identify the difficulties typically faced by Indians in the criminal and civil legal arenas and explore the public policy and legal rights of Indians as regards citizenship, voting rights, religious freedom, and basic governmental services.

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American Indians and National Parks
Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek
University of Arizona Press, 1998
Many national parks and monuments tell unique stories of the struggle between the rights of native peoples and the wants of the dominant society. These stories involve our greatest parks—Yosemite, Yellowstone, Mesa Verde, Glacier, the Grand Canyon, Olympic, Everglades—as well as less celebrated parks elsewhere. In American Indians and National Parks, authors Robert Keller and Michael Turek relate these untold tales of conflict and collaboration. American Indians and National Parks details specific relationships between native peoples and national parks, including land claims, hunting rights, craft sales, cultural interpretation, sacred sites, disposition of cultural artifacts, entrance fees, dams, tourism promotion, water rights, and assistance to tribal parks. Beginning with a historical account of Yosemite and Yellowstone, American Indians and National Parks reveals how the creation of the two oldest parks affected native peoples and set a pattern for the century to follow. Keller and Turek examine the evolution of federal policies toward land preservation and explore provocative issues surrounding park/Indian relations. When has the National Park Service changed its policies and attitudes toward Indian tribes, and why? How have environmental organizations reacted when native demands, such as those of the Havasupai over land claims in the Grand Canyon, seem to threaten a national park? How has the Park Service dealt with native claims to hunting and fishing rights in Glacier, Olympic, and the Everglades? While investigating such questions, the authors traveled extensively in national parks and conducted over 200 interviews with Native Americans, environmentalists, park rangers, and politicians. They meticulously researched materials in archives and libraries, assembling a rich collection of case studies ranging from the 19th century to the present. In American Indians and National Parks, Keller and Turek tackle a significant and complicated subject for the first time, presenting a balanced and detailed account of the Native-American/national-park drama. This book will prove to be an invaluable resource for policymakers, conservationists, historians, park visitors, and others who are concerned about preserving both cultural and natural resources.
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American Indians and the American Dream
Policies, Place, and Property in Minnesota
Kasey R. Keeler
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Understanding the processes and policies of urbanization and suburbanization in American Indian communities

 

Nearly seven out of ten American Indians live in urban areas, yet studies of urban Indian experiences remain scant. Studies of suburban Natives are even more rare. Today’s suburban Natives, the fastest-growing American Indian demographic, highlight the tensions within federal policies working in tandem to move and house differing groups of people in very different residential locations. In American Indians and the American Dream, Kasey R. Keeler examines the long history of urbanization and suburbanization of Indian communities in Minnesota.

At the intersection of federal Indian policy and federal housing policy, American Indians and the American Dream analyzes the dispossession of Indian land, property rights, and patterns of home ownership through programs and policies that sought to move communities away from their traditional homelands to reservations and, later, to urban and suburban areas. Keeler begins this analysis with the Homestead Act of 1862, then shifts to the Indian Reorganization Act in the early twentieth century, the creation of Little Earth in Minneapolis, and Indian homeownership during the housing bubble of the early 2000s.

American Indians and the American Dream investigates the ways American Indians accessed homeownership, working with and against federal policy, underscoring American Indian peoples’ unequal and exclusionary access to the way of life known as the American dream.

Cover alt text: Vintage photo of Native person bathing smiling child in the sink of a midcentury kitchen. Title in yellow.

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American Indians
The First of This Land
C. Matthew Snipp
Russell Sage Foundation, 1989
Native Americans are too few in number to swing presidential elections, affect national statistics, or attract consistent media attention. But their history illuminates our collective past and their current disadvantaged status reflects our problematic present. In American Indians: The First of This Land, C. Matthew Snipp provides an unrivaled chronicle of the position of American Indians and Alaskan Natives within the larger American society. Taking advantage of recent Census Bureau efforts to collect high-quality data for these groups, Snipp details the composition and characteristics of native Indian and Alaskan populations. His analyses of housing, family structure, language use and education, socioeconomic status, migration, and mortality are based largely on unpublished material not available in any other single source. He catalogs the remarkable diversity of a population—Eskimos, Aleuts, and numerous Indian tribes—once thought doomed to extinction but now making a dramatic comeback, exceeding 1 million for the first time in 300 years. Also striking is the pervasive influence of the federal bureaucracy on the social profile of American Indians, a profile similar at times to that of Third World populations in terms of literacy, income, and living conditions. Comparisons with black and white Americans throughout this study place its findings in perspective and confirm its stature as a benchmark volume. American Indians offers an unsurpassed overview of a minority group that is deeply embedded in American folklore, the first of this land historically but now among the last in its socioeconomic hierarchy. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Census Series
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Amulets, Effigies, Fetishes, and Charms
Native American Artifacts and Spirit Stones from the Northeast
Edward J. Lenik
University of Alabama Press, 2016
Rounds out Edward J. Lenik’s comprehensive and expert study of the rock art of northeastern Native Americans
 
Decorated stone artifacts are a significant part of archaeological studies of Native Americans in the Northeast. The artifacts illuminated in Amulets, Effigies, Fetishes, and Charms: Native American Artifacts and Spirit Stones from the Northeast include pecked, sculpted, or incised figures, images, or symbols. These are rendered on pebbles, plaques, pendants, axes, pestles, and atlatl weights, and are of varying sizes, shapes, and designs. Lenik draws from Indian myths and legends and incorporates data from ethnohistoric and archaeological sources together with local environmental settings in an attempt to interpret the iconography of these fascinating relics. For the Algonquian and Iroquois peoples, they reflect identity, status, and social relationships with other Indians as well as beings in the spirit world.
 
Lenik begins with background on the Indian cultures of the Northeast and includes a discussion of the dating system developed by anthropologists to describe prehistory. The heart of the content comprises more than eighty examples of portable rock art, grouped by recurring design motifs. This organization allows for in-depth analysis of each motif. The motifs examined range from people, animals, fish, and insects to geometric and abstract designs. Information for each object is presented in succinct prose, with a description, illustration, possible interpretation, the story of its discovery, and the location where it is now housed. Lenik also offers insight into the culture and lifestyle of the Native American groups represented. An appendix listing places to see and learn more about the artifacts and a glossary are included.
 
The material in this book, used in conjunction with Lenik’s previous research, offers a reference for virtually every known example of northeastern rock art. Archaeologists, students, and connoisseurs of Indian artistic expression will find this an invaluable work.
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Ancestral Places
Understanding Kanaka Geographies
Katrina-Ann R. Kapa'anaokalaokeola Nakoa Oliveira
Oregon State University Press, 2014
Ancestral Places explores the deep connections that ancestral Kanaka (Native Hawaiians) enjoyed with their environment. It honors the mo‘olelo (historical accounts) of the ancestral places of our kupuna (ancestors), and reveals how these mo‘olelo and our relationships with the ‘aina (land) inform a Kanaka sense of place.

Katrina-Ann R. Kapa‘anaokalaokeola Nakoa Oliveira elucidates a Kanaka geography and provides contemporary scholars with insights regarding traditional culture—including the ways in which Kanaka utilize cartographic performances to map our ancestral places and retain our mo‘olelo, such as reciting creation accounts, utilizing nuances embedded in language, and dancing hula.

A Kanaka by birth, a kumu ‘olelo Hawai‘i (language teacher) by profession, and a geographer by training, Oliveira’s interests intersect at the boundary where words and place-making meet her ancestral land. Thus, Ancestral Places imbues the theoretical with sensual practice. The book’s language moves fluidly between Hawaiian and English, terms are nimbly defined, and the work of the field is embodied: geographic layers are enacted within the text, new understandings created—not just among lexica, but amidst illustrations, charts, terms, and poetry.  

In Ancestral Places, Oliveira reasserts both the validity of ancestral knowledge systems and their impact in modernity. Her discussion of Kanaka geographies encompasses the entire archipelago, offering a new framework in Kanaka epistemology.
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Ancient Architecture of the Southwest
By William N. Morgan
University of Texas Press, 1994

During more than a thousand years before Europeans arrived in 1540, the native peoples of what is now the southwestern United States and northern Mexico developed an architecture of rich diversity and beauty. Vestiges of thousands of these dwellings and villages still remain, in locations ranging from Colorado in the north to Chihuahua in the south and from Nevada in the west to eastern New Mexico.

This study presents the most comprehensive architectural survey of the region currently available. Organized in five chronological sections that include 132 professionally rendered site drawings, the book examines architectural evolution from humble pit houses to sophisticated, multistory pueblos. The sections explore concurrent Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi developments, as well as those in the Salado, Sinagua, Virgin River, Kayenta, and other areas, and compare their architecture to contemporary developments in parts of eastern North America and Mesoamerica. The book concludes with a discussion of changes in Native American architecture in response to European influences.

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Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms
Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography
Edited by F. Kent Reilly, III, and James F. Garber
University of Texas Press, 2006

Between AD 900-1600, the native peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States conceived and executed one of the greatest artistic traditions of the Precolumbian Americas. Created in the media of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood, and incised or carved with a complex set of symbols and motifs, this seven-hundred-year-old artistic tradition functioned within a multiethnic landscape centered on communities dominated by earthen mounds and plazas. Previous researchers have referred to this material as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC).

This groundbreaking volume brings together ten essays by leading anthropologists, archaeologists, and art historians, who analyze the iconography of Mississippian art in order to reconstruct the ritual activities, cosmological vision, and ideology of these ancient precursors to several groups of contemporary Native Americans. Significantly, the authors correlate archaeological, ethnographic, and art historical data that illustrate the stylistic differences within Mississippian art as well as the numerous changes that occur through time. The research also demonstrates the inadequacy of the SECC label, since Mississippian art is not limited to the Southeast and reflects stylistic changes over time among several linked but distinct religious traditions. The term Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS) more adequately describes the corpus of this Mississippian art. Most important, the authors illustrate the overarching nature of the ancient Native American religious system, as a creation unique to the native American cultures of the eastern United States.

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Anguish Of Snails
Native American Folklore in the West
Barre Toelken
Utah State University Press, 2003
After a career working and living with American Indians and studying their traditions, Barre Toelken has written this sweeping study of Native American folklore in the West. Within a framework of performance theory, cultural worldview, and collaborative research, he examines Native American visual arts, dance, oral tradition (story and song), humor, and patterns of thinking and discovery to demonstrate what can be gleaned from Indian traditions by Natives and non-Natives alike. In the process he considers popular distortions of Indian beliefs, demystifies many traditions by showing how they can be comprehended within their cultural contexts, considers why some aspects of Native American life are not meant to be understood by or shared with outsiders, and emphasizes how much can be learned through sensitivity to and awareness of cultural values.

Winner of the 2004 Chicago Folklore Prize, The Anguish of Snails is an essential work for the collection of any serious reader in folklore or Native American studies.
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The Animals Came Dancing
Native American Sacred Ecology and Animal Kinship
Howard L. Harrod
University of Arizona Press, 2000
The Native American hunter had a true appreciation of where his food came from and developed a ritual relationship to animal life—an understanding and attitude almost completely lacking in modern culture. In this major overview of the relation between Indians and animals on the northern Great Plains, Howard Harrod recovers a sense of the knowledge that hunting peoples had of the animals upon which they depended and raises important questions about Euroamerican relationships with the natural world. Harrod's account deals with twelve Northern Plains peoples—Lakota, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Pawnee, and others—who with the arrival of the horse in the eighteenth century became the buffalo hunters who continue to inhabit the American imagination. Harrod describes their hunting practices and the presence of animals in their folklore and shows how these traditions reflect a "sacred ecology" in which humans exist in relationship with other powers, including animals. Drawing on memories of Native Americans recorded by anthropologists, fur traders, missionaries, and other observers, Harrod examines cultural practices that flourished from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. He reconstructs the complex rituals of Plains peoples, which included buffalo hunting ceremonies employing bundles or dancing, and rituals such as the Sun Dance for the renewal of animals. In a closing chapter, Harrod examines the meanings of Indian-animal relations for a contemporary society that values human dominance over the natural world—one in which domestic animals are removed from our consciousness as a source of food, wild animals are managed for humans to "experience," and hunting has become a form of recreation. His meticulous scholarship re-imagines a vanished way of life, while his keen insights give voice to a hunger among many contemporary people for the recovery of a ritual relationship between themselves and the natural sources of their lives.
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Anonimo Mexicano
Richley Crapo and Bonnie Glass-Coffin
Utah State University Press, 2005
Anonimo Mexicano is the first publication of the full Nahuatl text and English translation of a rare and important Native history of preconquest Mexico. Written circa 1600 by an anonymous Tlaxcaltecan author, it is an epic account of the settling of central Mexico by Nahua peoples from the northern frontier. They developed a sophisticated culture with powerful city states and an agricultural economy, fought great wars, established dynasties, and recorded their history and legends in painted books. The Mexica became the most powerful of these nations until their conquest by the Spanish with the help of the Tlaxcalteca, who were rivals of the Mexica and whose national origin tale was recorded in Anonimo Mexicano.
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Anthropologists and Indians in the New South
Edited by Rachel Bonney and J. Anthony Paredes; Foreword by Raymond D. Fogelson
University of Alabama Press, 2001
Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2002
 
A clear assessment of the growing mutual respect and strengthening bond between modern Native Americans and the researchers who explore their past
 
Southern Indians have experienced much change in the last half of the 20th century. In rapid succession since World War II, they have passed through the testing field of land claims litigation begun in the 1950s, played upon or retreated from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, seen the proliferation of “wannabe” Indian groups in the 1970s, and created innovative tribal enterprises—such as high-stakes bingo and gambling casinos—in the 1980s. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 stimulated a cultural renewal resulting in tribal museums and heritage programs and a rapprochement with their western kinsmen removed in “Old South” days.
 
Anthropology in the South has changed too, moving forward at the cutting edge of academic theory. This collection of essays reflects both that which has endured and that which has changed in the anthropological embrace of Indians from the New South. Beginning as an invited session at the 30th-anniversary meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society held in 1996, the collection includes papers by linguists, archaeologists, and physical anthropologists, as well as comments from Native Americans.
 
This broad scope of inquiry—ranging in subject from the Maya of Florida, presumed biology, and alcohol-related problems to pow-wow dancing, Mobilian linguistics, and the “lost Indian ancestor” myth—results in a volume valuable to students, professionals, and libraries. Anthropologists and Indians in the New South is a clear assessment of the growing mutual respect and strengthening bond between modern Native Americans and the researchers who explore their past.
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Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture
Lee D. Baker
Duke University Press, 2010
In the late nineteenth century, if ethnologists in the United States recognized African American culture, they often perceived it as something to be overcome and left behind. At the same time, they were committed to salvaging “disappearing” Native American culture by curating objects, narrating practices, and recording languages. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Lee D. Baker examines theories of race and culture developed by American anthropologists during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. He investigates the role that ethnologists played in creating a racial politics of culture in which Indians had a culture worthy of preservation and exhibition while African Americans did not.

Baker argues that the concept of culture developed by ethnologists to understand American Indian languages and customs in the nineteenth century formed the basis of the anthropological concept of race eventually used to confront “the Negro problem” in the twentieth century. As he explores the implications of anthropology’s different approaches to African Americans and Native Americans, and the field’s different but overlapping theories of race and culture, Baker delves into the careers of prominent anthropologists and ethnologists, including James Mooney Jr., Frederic W. Putnam, Daniel G. Brinton, and Franz Boas. His analysis takes into account not only scientific societies, journals, museums, and universities, but also the development of sociology in the United States, African American and Native American activists and intellectuals, philanthropy, the media, and government entities from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Supreme Court. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Baker tells how anthropology has both responded to and helped shape ideas about race and culture in the United States, and how its ideas have been appropriated (and misappropriated) to wildly different ends.

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Anthropology
Weaving Our Discipline with Community
Lisa J. Lefler
University of Tennessee Press, 2020

Anthropology: Weaving Our Discipline with Community presents examples of anthropologists working with Native communities to preserve and protect cultural heritage.Ray Fogelson provides a glimpse of his work with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Linguist Hartwell Francis shares his work on language preservation in the community today. Jim Sarbaugh and Lisa Lefler focus on traditional knowledge and health among the Cherokee. Trey Adcock explores the reasons that American Indians are strikingly underrepresented among both the student bodies and faculty of institutions of higher education. Brandon Lundy and his colleagues discuss the co-production of knowledge in ethnographic interviews with business, NGO, and government representatives in Guinea-Bissau.These papers were presented at the 2014 annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society (SAS) in Cherokee, North Carolina. 

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Anti-Indianism in Modern America
A Voice from Tatekeya's Earth
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
University of Illinois Press, 2000

Addressing Native American studies past, present, and future, the essays in New Indians, Old Wars tackle the discipline head-on, presenting a radical revision of the popular view of the American West in the process. Instead of luxuriating in the West's past glories or accepting the widespread historians' view of it as a shared place, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues that the American West should be fundamentally understood as stolen.

Cook-Lynn says that the Indian Wars of Resistance to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial effort to seize native lands and resources must be given standing in the face of the ever-growing imperial narrative of America--because the terror the world is now witnessing may be the direct consequence of events which began in America's earliest dealings with the natives of this continent. Cook-Lynn's story examines the ongoing and perennial relationship of conflict between colonizers and indigenous people, and it is a story that every American must read.

Cook-Lynn understands that the story of the American West teaches the political language of land theft and tyranny. She argues that to remedy this situation, Native American studies must be considered and pursued as its own discipline, rather than as a subset of history or anthropology. She makes an impassioned claim that such a shift, not merely an institutional or theoretical change, could allow Native American studies to play an important role in defending the sovereignty of indigenous nations today.

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Apachean Culture History and Ethnology
Keith H. Basso
University of Arizona Press, 1971
This volume grew out of a symposium held at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in November 1969 at New Orleans, Louisiana. The "Apachean Symposium" was designed to provide an opportunity for scholars engaged in research on southern Athapaskan cultures to report upon their findings, and wherever possible, to link them to known fact and existing theory. The diverse work presented here will add significantly to the knowledge about Apachean cultures, and each of contributions also pertains directly to wider spheres of anthropological concern.
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Arapaho Historical Traditions
Hinono'einoo3itoono
Alonzo Moss, Sr.
University of Manitoba Press, 2005
Told by Paul Moss (1911-1995), a highly respected storyteller and ceremonial leader, these twelve texts introduce us to an immensely rich literature. As works of an oral tradition, they had until now remained beyond the reach of those who do not speak the Arapaho language. Here, for the first time, these outstanding examples of indigenous North American literature are printed in their original language (in the standard orthography used on the Wind River Reservation) but made accessible to a wider audience through English translation and comprehensive introductions, notes, commentaries and an Arapaho-English glossary.The Arapaho traditions chosen for this anthology tell of hunting, scouting, fighting, horse-stealing, capture and escape, friendly encounters between tribes, diplomacy and war, conflict with the U.S. and battles with its troops. They also include accounts of vision quests and religious rites, the fate of an Arapaho woman captured by Utes, and Arapaho uses of the "Medicine Wheel"in the Bighorn Mountains.
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The Arapaho Language
Andrew Cowell
University Press of Colorado, 2015
The Arapaho Language is the definitive reference grammar of an endangered Algonquian language. Arapaho differs strikingly from other Algonquian languages, making it particularly relevant to the study of historical linguistics and the evolution of grammar. Andrew Cowell and Alonzo Moss Sr. document Arapaho's interesting features, including a pitch-based accent system with no exact Algonquian parallels, radical innovations in the verb system, and complex contrasts between affirmative and non-affirmative statements.

Cowell and Moss detail strategies used by speakers of this highly polysynthetic language to form complex words and illustrate how word formation interacts with information structure. They discuss word order and discourse-level features, treat the special features of formal discourse style and traditional narratives, and list gender-specific particles, which are widely used in conversation. Appendices include full sets of inflections for a variety of verbs.

Arapaho is spoken primarily in Wyoming, with a few speakers in Oklahoma. The corpus used in The Arapaho Language spans more than a century of documentation, including multiple speakers from Wyoming and Oklahoma, with emphasis on recent recordings from Wyoming. The book cites approximately 2,000 language examples drawn largely from natural discourse - either recorded spoken language or texts written by native speakers.

With The Arapaho Language, Cowell and Moss have produced a comprehensive document of a language that, in its departures from its nearest linguistic neighbors, sheds light on the evolution of grammar.

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The Archaeology of Native-Lived Colonialism
Challenging History in the Great Lakes
Neal Ferris
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Colonialism may have significantly changed the history of North America, but its impact on Native Americans has been greatly misunderstood. In this book, Neal Ferris offers alternative explanations of colonial encounters that emphasize continuity as well as change affecting Native behaviors. He examines how communities from three aboriginal nations in what is now southwestern Ontario negotiated the changes that accompanied the arrival of Europeans and maintained a cultural continuity with their pasts that has been too often overlooked in conventional “master narrative” histories of contact.

In reconsidering Native adaptation and resistance to colonial British rule, Ferris reviews five centuries of interaction that are usually read as a single event viewed through the lens of historical bias. He first examines patterns of traditional lifeway continuity among the Ojibwa, demonstrating their ability to maintain seasonal mobility up to the mid-nineteenth century and their adaptive response to its loss. He then looks at the experience of refugee Delawares, who settled among the Ojibwa as a missionary-sponsored community yet managed to maintain an identity distinct from missionary influences. And he shows how the archaeological history of the Six Nations Iroquois reflected patterns of negotiating emergent colonialism when they returned to the region in the 1780s, exploring how families managed tradition and the contemporary colonial world to develop innovative ways of revising and maintaining identity.

The Archaeology of Native-Lived Colonialism convincingly utilizes historical archaeology to link the Native experience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the deeper history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century interactions and with pre-European times. It shows how these Native communities succeeded in retaining cohesiveness through centuries of foreign influence and material innovations by maintaining ancient, adaptive social processes that both incorporated European ideas and reinforced historically understood notions of self and community.
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Arrow Rock
The Story of a Missouri Village
Authorene Wilson Phillips
University of Missouri Press, 2005
Arrow Rock, so named because Native Americans once went there to shape their arrowheads from the flint found along the Missouri River, is a small historic village. Today fewer than one hundred people call Arrow Rock home, but its scenic location and rich history continue to attract thousands of visitors every year.
In June 1804, the Corps of Discovery passed “the big arrow rock,” as William Clark noted in his journal, “a handsome spot for a town . . . the situation is elegant, commanding and healthy, the land about it fine, well-timbered and watered.” Settlers soon arrived, some bringing slaves who developed the large farms; the village that was established grew slowly but saw profits from trade on the river. The beginnings of trade in the far west, the gold rush, and the Civil War all had profound effects on the settlers.
Meanwhile, area residents were having an effect on the world. George Caleb Bingham, who became known as the “Missouri artist,” participated in the founding of the town and built a home there, and Dr. John Sappington, an early resident of Arrow Rock, saved thousands of lives by perfecting a treatment for malaria. Also calling Arrow Rock home were numerous influential politicians, including three governors, M. M. Marmaduke, Claiborne Fox Jackson, and John Sappington Marmaduke.
Life changed after the Civil War, and Arrow Rock changed, too. As railroads and major highways bypassed the town, many people moved away and fewer came through. Arrow Rock provides insight into the progression of history and its effects on one small Missouri town. The story of this village, now a historic site, brings to life the history of America: early days of settlement, an era of prosperity and power for some and incredible hardship for others, wars, a decline, and a rebirth. In addition, the long roll call of those who visited the area provides a history of the opening of the West.
This book will prove valuable to those interested in Missouri history; the developing nation; and the geographical, political, and recreational forces that were at work as so many came and went. Like a visit to Arrow Rock itself, this book allows readers to step back into history and appreciate a time when the river was the highway.
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Art for an Undivided Earth
The American Indian Movement Generation
Jessica L. Horton
Duke University Press, 2017
In Art for an Undivided Earth Jessica L. Horton reveals how the spatial philosophies underlying the American Indian Movement (AIM) were refigured by a generation of artists searching for new places to stand. Upending the assumption that Jimmie Durham, James Luna, Kay WalkingStick, Robert Houle, and others were primarily concerned with identity politics, she joins them in remapping the coordinates of a widely shared yet deeply contested modernity that is defined in great part by the colonization of the Americas. She follows their installations, performances, and paintings across the ocean and back in time, as they retrace the paths of Native diplomats, scholars, performers, and objects in Europe after 1492. Along the way, Horton intervenes in a range of theories about global modernisms, Native American sovereignty, racial difference, archival logic, artistic itinerancy, and new materialisms. Writing in creative dialogue with contemporary artists, she builds a picture of a spatially, temporally, and materially interconnected world—an undivided earth.
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As If the Land Owned Us
An Ethnohistory of the White Mesa Utes
Robert S. McPherson
University of Utah Press, 2011

The Ute people of White Mesa have a long, colorful, but neglected history in the Four Corners region. Although they ranged into the Great Basin, Southwest, and parts of the Rocky Mountains as hunters, gatherers, and warriors, southeastern Utah was home. There they adapted culturally and physically to the austere environment while participating in many of the well-known events of their times.

In As If the Land Owned Us, Robert McPherson has gathered the wisdom of White Mesa elders as they imparted knowledge about their land—place names, uses, teachings, and historic events tied to specific sites—providing a fresh insight into the lives of these little-known people. While there have been few published studies about the Southern Utes, this ethnohistory is the first to mix cultural and historic events. The book illustrates the life and times of the White Mesa Utes as they faced multiple changes to their lifeways. It is time for their history to be told in their terms.
 

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As Long As The River Shall Run
An Ethnohistory Of Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation
Martha C. Knack
University of Nevada Press, 1999
The history of the Northern Paiutes of Pyramid Lake in northwestern Nevada is one fraught with the conflicts and tensions of the modern West—relentless encroachment by non-Indians into Indian lands; disputes over scarce water; endangerment of a rare and valuable species of fish—all played out on a stage that stretches from the centers of national politics in Washington, DC, to a remote desert reservation where an ancient people struggles to preserve the traditional center of its spiritual and economic life. Martha Knack’s and Omer Stewart’s brilliant interdisciplinary study of the Pyramid Lake Reservation, first published in 1984, is considered a major landmark in American Indian history—a lucid and insightful examination of the Paiutes, their reservation, and the ongoing controversy over control of their land and the life-giving Truckee River waters that feed Pyramid Lake. The complex interethnic relations described in this book offer readers a case study of the dominant issues in Indian affairs and the themes of the legislation and court decisions that shape the fates of native peoples.
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As Long as the Rivers Run
Hydroelectric Development and Native Communities
James B. Waldram
University of Manitoba Press, 1993
In past treaties, the Aboriginal people of Canada surrendered title to their lands in return for guarantees that their traditional ways of life would be protected. Since the 1950s, governments have reneged on these commitments in order to acquire more land and water for hydroelectric development. James B. Waldram examines this controversial topic through an analysis of the politics of hydroelectric dam construction in the Canadian Northwest, focusing on three Aboriginal communities in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. He argues that little has changed in our treatment of Aboriginal people in the past hundred years, when their resources are still appropriated by the government “for the common good.” Using archival materials, personal interviews and largely inaccessible documents and letters, Waldram highlights the clear parallel between the treatment of Aboriginal people in the negotiations and agreements that accompany hydro development with the treaty and scrip processes of the past century.
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Asserting Native Resilience
Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis
Edited by Zoltán Grossman and Alan Parker
Oregon State University Press, 2012
Indigenous nations are on the front line of the climate crisis. With cultures and economies among the most vulnerable to climate-related catastrophes, Native peoples are developing twenty-first century responses to climate change that serve as a model for Natives and non-Native communities alike.

Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest and Indigenous peoples around the Pacific Rim have already been deeply affected by droughts, flooding, reduced glaciers and snowmelts, seasonal shifts in winds and storms, and the northward movement of species on the land and in the ocean. Using tools of resilience, Native peoples are creating defenses to strengthen their communities, mitigate losses, and adapt where possible.

Asserting Native Resilience presents a rich variety of perspectives on Indigenous responses to the climate crisis, reflecting the voices of more than twenty contributors, including tribal leaders, scientists, scholars, and activists from the Pacific Northwest, British Columbia, Alaska, and Aotearoa / New Zealand, and beyond. Also included is a resource directory of Indigenous governments, NGOs, and communities and a community organizing booklet for use by Northwest tribes.


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At Home in the World
Michael Jackson
Duke University Press, 1995
Ours is a century of uprootedness, with fewer and fewer people living out their lives where they are born. At such a time, in such a world, what does it mean to be "at home?" Perhaps among a nomadic people, for whom dwelling is not synonymous with being housed and settled, the search for an answer to this question might lead to a new way of thinking about home and homelessness, exile and belonging. At Home in the World is the story of just such a search. Intermittently over a period of three years Michael Jackson lived, worked, and traveled extensively in Central Australia. This book chronicles his experience among the Warlpiri of the Tanami Desert.
Something of a nomad himself, having lived in New Zealand, Sierra Leone, England, France, Australia, and the United States, Jackson is deft at capturing the ambiguities of home as a lived experience among the Warlpiri. Blending narrative ethnography, empirical research, philosophy, and poetry, he focuses on the existential meaning of being at home in the world. Here home becomes a metaphor for the intimate relationship between the part of the world a person calls "self" and the part of the world called "other." To speak of "at-homeness," Jackson suggests, implies that people everywhere try to strike a balance between closure and openness, between acting and being acted upon, between acquiescing in the given and choosing their own fate. His book is an exhilarating journey into this existential struggle, responsive at every turn to the political questions of equity and justice that such a struggle entails.
A moving depiction of an aboriginal culture at once at home and in exile, and a personal meditation on the practice of ethnography and the meaning of home in our increasingly rootless age, At Home in the World is a timely reflection on how, in defining home, we continue to define ourselves.
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At the Desert's Green Edge
An Ethnobotany of the Gila River Pima
Amadeo M. Rea; With a Foreword by Gary Paul Nabhan; Sumi-e Illustrations by Takashi Ijichi; Linguistic Consultant Culver Cassa
University of Arizona Press, 1997
Winner of the Society for Economic Botany’s Klinger Book Award

The Akimel O'odham, or Pima Indians, of the northern Sonoran Desert continue to make their home along Arizona's Gila River despite the alarming degradation of their habitat that has occurred over the past century. The oldest living Pimas can recall a lush riparian ecosystem and still recite more than two hundred names for plants in their environment, but they are the last generation who grew up subsisting on cultivated native crops or wild-foraged plants. Ethnobiologist Amadeo M. Rea has written the first complete ethnobotany of the Gila River Pima and has done so from the perspective of the Pimas themselves.

At the Desert's Green Edge weaves the Pima view of the plants found in their environment with memories of their own history and culture, creating a monumental testament to their traditions and way of life. Rea first discusses the Piman people, environment, and language, then proceeds to share their botanical knowledge in entries for 240 plants that systematically cover information on economic botany, folk taxonomy, and linguistics. The entries are organized according to Pima life-form categories such as plants growing in water, eaten greens, and planted fruit trees. All are anecdotal, conveying the author's long personal involvement with the Pimas, whether teaching in their schools or learning from them in conversations and interviews.

At the Desert's Green Edge is an archive of otherwise unavailable plant lore that will become a benchmark for botanists and anthropologists. Enhanced by more than one hundred brush paintings of plants, it is written to be equally useful to nonspecialists so that the Pimas themselves can turn to it as a resource regarding their former lifeways. More than an encyclopedia of facts, it is the Pimas' own story, a witness to a changing way of life in the Sonoran Desert.
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front cover of At the Risk of Being Heard
At the Risk of Being Heard
Identity, Indigenous Rights, and Postcolonial States
Bartholomew Dean and Jerome M. Levi, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Leading experts in the analysis of ethnicity and indigenous rights explore the questions of why and how the circumstances of indigenous peoples are improving in some places of the world, while their human rights continue to be abused in others. Drawing on case studies from Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas, chapters explore how political organization, natural resource management, economic development, and conflicting definitions over cultural, linguistic, religious, and territorial identity have informed indigenous strategies for empowerment.
Combining rich ethnographic descriptions with clear theoretical analyses, At the Risk of Being Heard considers the paradoxical challenges and opportunities confronting indigenous peoples at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In the face of state-sanctioned violence, indigenous peoples encounter considerable risks when asserting their rights, especially to self-determination. Yet, if they remain silent or absent from new arenas of power, hiding in marginalized homelands or cultural practices, they risk being invisible to those allies that would aid them in their struggles for survival.
At the Risk of Being Heard offers needed insights for individuals working on issues of governance, sustainable development, resource management, globalization, and indigenous affairs. It will undoubtedly appeal to undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology, sociology, history, political science, peace studies, and to those students in courses that explore relationships among postcolonial states, indigenous peoples, and human rights.
Bartholomew Dean is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Kansas. Jerome M. Levi is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Carleton College.
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Aymara Indian Perspectives on Development in the Andes
Amy Eisenberg
University of Alabama Press, 2013
Explores the relationship between indigenous people, the management of natural resources, and the development process in a modernizing region of Chile
 
Aymara Indians are a geographically isolated, indigenous people living in the Andes Mountains near Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the most arid regions of the world. As rapid economic growth in the area has begun to divert scarce water to hydroelectric and agricultural projects, the Aymara struggle to maintain their sustainable and traditional systems of water use, agriculture, and pastoralism.

In Aymara Indian Perspectives on Development in the Andes, Amy Eisenberg provides a detailed exploration of the ethnoecological dimensions of the tension between the Aymara, whose economic, spiritual, and social life are inextricably tied to land and water, and three major challenges: the paving of Chile Highway 11, the diversion of the Altiplano waters of the Río Lauca for irrigation and power-generation, and Chilean national park policies regarding Aymara communities, their natural resources, and cultural properties within Parque Nacional Lauca, the International Biosphere Reserve.

Pursuing collaborative research, Eisenberg performed ethnographic interviews with Aymara people in more than sixteen Andean villages, some at altitudes of 4,600 meters. Drawing upon botany, agriculture, natural history, physical and cultural geography, history, archaeology, and social and environmental impact assessment, she presents deep, multifaceted insights from the Aymara’s point of view.

Illustrated with maps and dramatic photographs by John Amato, Aymara Indian Perspectives on Development in the Andes provides an account of indigenous perspectives and concerns related to economic development that will be invaluable to scholars and policy-makers in the fields of natural and cultural resource preservation in and beyond Chile.
 
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Aztec Antichrist
Performing the Apocalypse in Early Colonial Mexico
Ben Leeming
University Press of Colorado, 2022
In Aztec Antichrist, Ben Leeming presents a transcription, translation, and study of two sixteenth-century Nahuatl religious plays that are likely the earliest surviving presentations of the Antichrist legend in the Americas, and possibly the earliest surviving play scripts in the whole of the New World in any language.
 
Discovered in the archives of the Hispanic Society of America in New York inside a notebook of miscellaneous Nahuatl-Christian texts written almost entirely by an Indigenous writer named Fabían de Aquino, the plays are filled with references to human sacrifice, bloodletting, ritual divination, and other religious practices declared “idolatrous” at a time when ecclesiastical authorities actively sought to suppress writing about Indigenous religion. These are Indigenous plays for an Indigenous audience that reveal how Nahuas made sense of Christianity and helped form its colonial image—the title figure is a powerful Indigenous being, an “Aztec Antichrist,” who violently opposes the evangelizing efforts of the church and seeks to draw converted Nahuas back to the religious practices of their ancestors. These practices include devotion to Nahua deities such as Tlaloc, Quetzalcoatl, and Tezcatlipoca who, in one of the most striking moves made by Aquino, are cast as characters in the plays.
 
Along with the translations, Leeming provides context and analysis highlighting these rare and fascinating examples of early Indigenous American literature that offer a window into the complexity of Nahua interactions with Christianity in the early colonial period. The work is extremely valuable to all students and scholars of Latin American religion, colonialism, Indigenous history, and early modern history and theater.
 
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front cover of Aztec Ceremonial Landscapes
Aztec Ceremonial Landscapes
Davíd Carrasco
University Press of Colorado, 1999
A result of four years of cooperative research between the University of Colorado and the Templo Mayor Project of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, Aztec Ceremonial Landscapes (formerly available as To Change Place) offers new interpretive models from the fields of archaeoastronomy, history of religion, anthropology, art history, and archaeology. Included are contributions by such noted experts as Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Davíd Carrasco, Alfredo López Austin, Doris Heyden, Richard F. Townsend, Anthony Aveni, Henry B. Nicholson, Elizabeth Boone, Felipe Solis, and Johanna Broda, with a new introduction by William Fash.
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