front cover of Aggression and Sufferings
Aggression and Sufferings
Settler Violence, Native Resistance, and the Coalescence of the Old South
F. Evan Nooe
University of Alabama Press, 2024
A bold reconceptualization of how settler expansion and narratives of victimhood, honor, and revenge drove the conquest and erasure of the Native South and fed the emergence of a distinct white southern identity
 
In 1823, Tennessee historian John Haywood encapsulated a foundational sentiment among the white citizenry of Tennessee when he wrote of a “long continued course of aggression and sufferings” between whites and Native Americans. According to F. Evan Nooe, “aggression” and “sufferings” are broad categories that can be used to represent the framework of factors contributing to the coalescence of the white South.

Traditionally, the concept of coalescence is an anthropological model used to examine the transformation of Indigenous communities in the Eastern Woodlands from chieftaincies to Native tribes, confederacies, and nations in response to colonialism. Applying this concept to white southerners, Nooe argues that through the experiences and selective memory of settlers in the antebellum South, white southerners incorporated their aggression against and suffering at the hands of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeast in the coalescence of a regional identity built upon the violent dispossession of the Native South. This, in turn, formed a precursor to Confederate identity and its later iterations in the long nineteenth century.

Geographically, Aggression and Sufferings prioritizes events in South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Nooe considers how divergent systems of violence and justice between Native Americans and white settlers (such as blood revenge and concepts of honor) functioned in the region and examines the involved societies’ conflicting standards on how to equitably resolve interpersonal violence. Finally, Nooe explores how white southerners constructed, propagated, and perpetuated harrowing tales of colonizers as both victims and heroes in the violent expulsion of the region’s Native peoples from their homelands. This constructed sense of regional history and identity continued to flower into the antebellum period, during western expansion, and well through the twentieth century.
 
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Alluvium and Empire
The Archaeology of Colonial Resettlement and Indigenous Persistence on Peru’s North Coast
Parker VanValkenburgh
University of Arizona Press, 2021
Alluvium and Empire uncovers the stories of Indigenous people who were subject to one of the largest waves of forced resettlement in human history, the Reducción General. In 1569, Spanish administrators attempted to move at least 1.4 million Indigenous people into a series of planned towns called reducciones, with the goal of reshaping their households, communities, and religious practices. However, in northern Peru’s Zaña Valley, this process failed to go as the Spanish had planned. In Alluvium and Empire, Parker VanValkenburgh explores both the short-term processes and long-term legacies of Indigenous resettlement in this region, drawing particular attention to the formation of complex relationships between Indigenous communities, imperial institutions, and the dynamic environments of Peru’s north coast.

The volume draws on nearly ten years of field and archival research to craft a nuanced account of the Reducción General and its aftermath. Written at the intersections of history and archaeology, Alluvium and Empire at once bears witness to the violence of Spanish colonization and highlights Indigenous resilience in the aftermath of resettlement. In the process, VanValkenburgh critiques previous approaches to the study of empire and models a genealogical approach that attends to the open-ended—and often unpredictable—ways in which empires take shape.
 
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Armenians and the Allies in Cilicia, 1914-1923
Yucel Guclu
University of Utah Press, 2010
In the midst of World War I, the Ottoman government forcibly removed many of its Armenian citizens from their eastern Anatolian lands. While recognizing the controversy and tragedy of the events of 1915 that led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians, author Yücel Güçlü refrains from accepting the genocidal label that other scholars have assigned the episode.

Güçlü bases his claim largely on evidence from state and military archives in Turkey, Britain, France, and the United States that look specifically into the Ottoman version of history, placing the whole question of forced population displacements in a wider and more nuanced perspective than that in which it is usually depicted. According to the author, revolutionary Armenian forces were threatening the Ottoman Empire from within as it was simultaneously threatened by external forces. Armenians were also actively involved with Allied forces throughout World War I. In response, the Ottoman government ordered the movement of the Armenian population away from protected and sensitive war zones. The actions taken by the Ottoman Empire to control the Armenian population were those of relocation, not extermination.

Working to explain why the Armenian conflict emerged and how it was eventually resolved, this book discusses the Armenian revolutionary and separatist movements, Turkish measures of self defense, and Allied schemes regarding the region during the period. It places special emphasis on the influence of Allied forces on the actions of Armenians in Cilicia.
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Beyond Chaco
Great Kiva Communities on the Mogollon Rim Frontier
Sarah A. Herr
University of Arizona Press, 2001
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries A.D., the Mogollon Rim region of east-central Arizona was a frontier, situated beyond and between larger regional organizations such as Chaco, Hohokam, and Mimbres. On this southwestern edge of the Puebloan world, past settlement poses a contradiction to those who study it. Population density was low and land abundant, yet the region was overbuilt with great kivas, a form of community-level architecture. Using a frontier model to evaluate household, community, and regional data, Sarah Herr demonstrates that the archaeological patterns of the Mogollon Rim region were created by the flexible and creative behaviors of small-scale agriculturalists. These people lived in a land-rich and labor-poor environment in which expediency, mobility, and fluid social organization were the rule and rigid structures and normative behaviors the exception. Herr's research shows that the eleventh- and twelfth-century inhabitants of the Mogollon Rim region were recent migrants, probably from the southern portion of the Chacoan region. These early settlers built houses and ceremonial structures and made ceramic vessels that resembled those of their homeland, but their social and political organization was not the same as that of their ancestors. Mogollon Rim communities were shaped by the cultural backgrounds of migrants, by their liminal position on the political landscape, and by the unique processes associated with frontiers. As migrants moved from homeland to frontier, a reversal in the proportion of land to labor dramatically changed the social relations of production. Herr argues that when the context of production changes in this way, wealth-in-people becomes more valuable than material wealth, and social relationships and cultural symbols such as the great kiva must be reinterpreted accordingly. Beyond Chaco expands our knowledge of the prehistory of this region and contributes to our understanding of how ancestral communities were constituted in lower-population areas of the agrarian Southwest.
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The Cherokee Lottery
A Sequence of Poems
William Jay Smith
Northwestern University Press, 2000
For the first time in poetic form, The Cherokee Lottery treats one of the greatest tragedies in American history, the forced removal of the Southern Indian tribes east of the Mississippi. When gold was discovered on Cherokee land in northern Georgia in 1828, the U.S. Government passed the Removal Act, and 18,000 Cherokees, along with other southern tribes—Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Creeks—were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma territory. Herded along under armed guard, they traveled in bitter cold weather and as many as a quarter died on what became known as "The Trail of Tears."

In powerful poetry of epic proportions, which Harold Bloom has called his best work, Smith paints a stark and vivid picture of this ordeal and its principal participants, among them Sequoyah, the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, and Osceola, the Seminole chief.

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Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands
Migration, Environment, and Health in the Former Sudetenland
Eagle Glassheim
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
In this innovative study of the aftermath of ethnic cleansing, Eagle Glassheim examines the transformation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland from the end of the Second World War, through the Cold War, and into the twenty-first century.
            Prior to their expulsion in 1945, ethnic Germans had inhabited the Sudeten borderlands for hundreds of years, with deeply rooted local cultures and close, if sometimes tense, ties with Bohemia’s Czech majority. Cynically, if largely willingly, harnessed by Hitler in 1938 to his pursuit of a Greater Germany, the Sudetenland’s three million Germans became the focus of Czech authorities in their retributive efforts to remove an alien ethnic element from the body politic—and claim the spoils of this coal-rich, industrialized area. Yet, as Glassheim reveals, socialist efforts to create a modern utopia in the newly resettled “frontier” territories proved exceedingly difficult. Many borderland regions remained sparsely populated, peppered with dilapidated and abandoned houses, and hobbled by decaying infrastructure. In the more densely populated northern districts, coalmines, chemical works, and power plants scarred the land and spewed toxic gases into the air. What once was a diverse religious, cultural, economic, and linguistic “contact zone,” became, according to many observers, a scarred wasteland, both physically and psychologically.
            Glassheim offers new perspectives on the struggles of reclaiming ethnically cleansed lands in light of utopian dreams and dystopian realities—brought on by the uprooting of cultures, the loss of communities, and the industrial degradation of a once-thriving region. To Glassheim, the lessons drawn from the Sudetenland speak to the deep social traumas and environmental pathologies wrought by both ethnic cleansing and state-sponsored modernization processes that accelerated across Europe as a result of the great wars of the twentieth century.
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Dispersing the Ghetto
The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants Across America
Jack Glazier
Michigan State University Press, 2005

In the early 20th century, the population of New York City’s Lower East Side swelled with vast numbers of eastern European Jewish immigrants. The tenements, whose inhabitants faced poverty and frequent unemployment, provoked the hostile attention of immigration restrictionists, many of whom disdained Jews, racial minorities, and foreigners as inferior. Accordingly, they aimed to stifle the growth of dense ethnic settlements by curtailing immigration. 
     Dispersing the Ghetto is the first book to describe in detail an important but little-known chapter in American immigration history, that of the Industrial Removal Office (IRO), founded in 1901. Established American Jews—arrivals from the German states only a generation before—felt vulnerable. They feared their security was at risk owing to the rising tide of Russian Jews on the east coast. German American Jews believed they too might become the objects of anti-Semitic scorn, which would be disastrous for German and Russian Jews alike if it were allowed to shape public policy. As a defensive measure to undercut the immigration restrictionist movement, American Jews of German origin established the Industrial Removal Office to promote the relocation of the immigrants to the towns and cities of the nation’s interior. Until the onset of World War I, the IRO directed the resettlement of Jewish immigrants from New York and other port cities to hundreds of communities nationwide. 
     Drawing on a variety of sources, including the IRO archive, first-person accounts of resettlement, local records, and the Jewish press, Glazier recounts the operation of the IRO and the complex relationship between two sets of Jewish immigrants.

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Follow the New Way
American Refugee Resettlement Policy and Hmong Religious Change
Melissa May Borja
Harvard University Press, 2023

An incisive look at Hmong religion in the United States, where resettled refugees found creative ways to maintain their traditions, even as Christian organizations deputized by the government were granted an outsized influence on the refugees’ new lives.

Every year, members of the Hmong Christian Church of God in Minneapolis gather for a cherished Thanksgiving celebration. But this Thanksgiving takes place in the spring, in remembrance of the turbulent days in May 1975 when thousands of Laotians were evacuated for resettlement in the United States. For many Hmong, passage to America was also a spiritual crossing. As they found novel approaches to living, they also embraced Christianity—called kev cai tshiab, “the new way”—as a means of navigating their complex spiritual landscapes.

Melissa May Borja explores how this religious change happened and what it has meant for Hmong culture. American resettlement policies unintentionally deprived Hmong of the resources necessary for their time-honored rituals, in part because these practices, blending animism, ancestor worship, and shamanism, challenged many Christian-centric definitions of religion. At the same time, because the government delegated much of the resettlement work to Christian organizations, refugees developed close and dependent relationships with Christian groups. Ultimately the Hmong embraced Christianity on their own terms, adjusting to American spiritual life while finding opportunities to preserve their customs.

Follow the New Way illustrates America’s wavering commitments to pluralism and secularism, offering a much-needed investigation into the public work done by religious institutions with the blessing of the state. But in the creation of a Christian-inflected Hmong American animism we see the resilience of tradition—how it deepens under transformative conditions.

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A History in Indigenous Voices
Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Oneida, Stockbridge, and Brothertown Interactions in the Removal Era
Carol Cornelius
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2023
A history of Wisconsin’s Indigenous past, present, and future—in Native peoples’ own words.  

Treaties made in the 1800s between the United States and the Indigenous nations of what is now Wisconsin have had profound influence on the region’s cultural and political landscape. Yet few people realize that in the early part of that century, the Menominee and Ho-Chunk Nations of Wisconsin signed land treaties with several Indigenous nations from New York State. At the onset of the removal era, these eastern nations, including the Oneida Nation and the Six Nations Confederacy, were under constant pressure from the federal government and land speculators to move to lands around Green Bay and Lake Winnebago. In this groundbreaking book, Carol A. Cornelius has compiled a careful account of these nation-to-nation treaties, in large part in the words of those Indigenous leaders who served as the voices and representatives of their nations. Drawing on a rich collection of primary sources, Cornelius walks readers through how, why, and for whom these treaties were made and how the federal government’s failure and unwillingness to acknowledge their legitimacy led to the further loss of Indigenous lands. The living documents transcribed here testify to the complexity and sovereignty of Indigenous governance then and now, making this volume a vital resource for historians and an accessible introduction to Indigenous treatymaking in Wisconsin.
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Indian Country, God's Country
Native Americans And The National Parks
Philip Burnham
Island Press, 2000
The mythology of "gifted land" is strong in the Park Service, but some of our greatest parks were "gifted" by people who had little if any choice in the matter. Places like the Grand Canyon's south rim and Glacier had to be bought, finagled, borrowed -- or taken by force -- when Indian occupants and owners resisted the call to contribute to the public welfare. The story of national parks and Indians is, depending on perspective, a costly triumph of the public interest, or a bitter betrayal of America's native people.In Indian Country, God's Country historian Philip Burnham traces the complex relationship between Native Americans and the national parks, relating how Indians were removed, relocated, or otherwise kept at arm's length from lands that became some of our nation's most hallowed ground. Burnham focuses on five parks: Glacier, the Badlands, Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon, and Death Valley. Based on archival research and extensive personal visits and interviews, he examines the beginnings of the national park system and early years of the National Park Service, along with later Congressional initiatives to mainstream American Indians and expand and refurbish the parks. The final chapters visit the parks as they are today, presenting the thoughts and insights of superintendents and rangers, tribal officials and archaeologists, ranchers, community leaders, curators, and elders. Burnham reports on hard-won compromises that have given tribes more autonomy and greater cultural recognition in recent years, while highlighting stubborn conflicts that continue to mark relations between tribes and the parks.Indian Country, God's Country offers a compelling -- and until now untold -- story that illustrates the changing role of the national parks in American society, the deep ties of Native Americans to the land, and the complicated mix of commerce, tourism, and environmental preservation that characterize the parks system. Anyone interested in Native American culture and history, the history of the American West, the national park system, or environmental history will find it a fascinating and engaging work.
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Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds
Religion and Modernity in a Transnational K'iche' Community
C. James MacKenzie
University Press of Colorado, 2016

Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds examines tension and conflict over ethnic and religious identity in the K’iche’ Maya community of San Andrés Xecul in the Guatemalan Highlands and considers how religious and ethnic attachments are sustained and transformed through the transnational experiences of locals who have migrated to the United States.

Author C. James MacKenzie explores the relationship among four coexisting religious communities within Highland Maya villages in contemporary Guatemala—costumbre, traditionalist religion with a shamanic substrate; “Enthusiastic Christianity,” versions of Charismaticism and Pentecostalism; an “inculturated” and Mayanized version of Catholicism; and a purified and antisyncretic Maya Spirituality—with attention to the modern and nonmodern worldviews that sustain them. He introduces a sophisticated set of theories to interpret both traditional religion and its relationship to other contemporary religious options, analyzing the relation among these various worldviews in terms of the indigenization of modernity and the various ways modernity can be apprehended as an intellectual project or an embodied experience.

Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds investigates the way an increasingly plural religious landscape intersects with ethnic and other identities. It will be of interest to Mesoamerican and Mayan ethnographers, as well as students and scholars of cultural anthropology, indigenous cultures, globalization, and religion.


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Living in the Land of Death
The Choctaw Nation, 1830-1860
Donna L. Akers
Michigan State University Press, 2004

With the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Choctaw people began their journey over the Trail of Tears from their homelands in Mississippi to the new lands of the Choctaw Nation. Suffering a death rate of nearly 20 percent due to exposure, disease, mismanagement, and fraud, they limped into Indian Territory, or, as they knew it, the Land of the Dead (the route taken by the souls of Choctaw people after death on their way to the Choctaw afterlife). Their first few years in the new nation affirmed their name for the land, as hundreds more died from whooping cough, floods, starvation, cholera, and smallpox.
     Living in the Land of the Dead depicts the story of Choctaw survival, and the evolution of the Choctaw people in their new environment. Culturally, over time, their adaptation was one of homesteads and agriculture, eventually making them self-sufficient in the rich new lands of Indian Territory. Along the Red River and other major waterways several Choctaw families of mixed heritage built plantations, and imported large crews of slave labor to work cotton fields. They developed a sub-economy based on interaction with the world market. However, the vast majority of Choctaws continued with their traditional subsistence economy that was easily adapted to their new environment.
     The immigrant Choctaws did not, however, move into land that was vacant. The U.S. government, through many questionable and some outright corrupt extralegal maneuvers, chose to believe it had gained title through negotiations with some of the peoples whose homelands and hunting grounds formed Indian Territory. Many of these indigenous peoples reacted furiously to the incursion of the Choctaws onto their rightful lands. They threatened and attacked the Choctaws and other immigrant Indian Nations for years. Intruding on others’ rightful homelands, the farming-based Choctaws, through occupation and economics, disrupted the traditional hunting economy practiced by the Southern Plains Indians, and contributed to the demise of the Plains ways of life.

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The Long Journey of the Nez Perce
A Battle History from Cottonwood to Bear Paw
Kevin Carson
Westholme Publishing, 2011

Chiefs Joseph, Looking Glass, White Bird, and Their People Against the United States
In 1877, the U.S. Government opened the Nez Perce lands in Oregon to settlers and ordered the tribe to move to a reservation in Idaho Territory. Although reluctant to leave their homeland, the Nez Perce began the long trek eastward. A small band of young warriors vented their frustration, however, in two days of deadly attacks on settlements along the Salmon River. Realizing that the U.S. response would be overwhelming—particularly in light of Custer’s defeat the year before—the Nez Perce leaders, including Chiefs Joseph, Looking Glass, and White Bird, prepared their people for war. A U.S. Army battalion led by Civil War general Oliver O. Howard along with several other coordinated army units began pursuit in an effort to subdue the Nez Perce and forceably move them to the reservation. The Nez Perce resolved to escape to freedom in Canada. Using their intimate knowledge of the land and their native Appaloosa horses skillfully, the Nez Perce were able to successfully check and elude the much larger American force for more than three months as they wound their way across the Rocky Mountains, through the newly established Yellowstone National Park, and into Montana. The war finally ended when the exhausted Indians—men, women, and children—were surrounded in the Bear Paw Mountains. Looking Glass was shot dead, and at this point, Chief Joseph relinquished and gave his famous address of surrender to General Howard. While most of the Nez Perce ended up on a reservation, the band led by White Bird was able to make their way to Canada and freedom.

The Nez Perce War is one of the most important and emotional campaigns of the Indian Wars. It essentially closed an era in American history, and the amount of time, money, and troops required to subdue the Nez Perce brought the plight of American Indians and the reservation system to the front pages of newspapers around the world. In The Long Journey of the Nez Perce: A Battle History from Cottonwood to Bear Paw, former U.S. Army engineering officer Kevin Carson brings his intimate knowledge of the territory crossed by the Nez Perce along with his skill as a cartographer to reconstruct in detail the battles and skirmishes along the entire route of the conflict.

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Lost in Transition
Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia
Aaron D. Purcell
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

In Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia, Aaron D. Purcell presents a thematic and chronological exploration of twentieth-century removal and resettlement projects across southern Appalachia. The book shares complex stories of loss and recollection that have grown and evolved over time.

This edited volume contains seven case studies of public land removal actions in Virginia, Kentucky, the Carolinas, and Tennessee from the 1930s through the 1960s. Some of the removals include the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Norris Basin, Shenandoah National Park and the New River, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the Keowee-Toxaway Project in northwestern South Carolina. Each essay asks key questions: How did governmental entities throughout the twentieth century deal with land acquisition and removal of families and communities? What do the oral histories of the families and communities, particularly from different generations, tell us about the legacies of these removals? This collection reveals confrontations between past and present, federal agencies and citizens, and the original accounts of removal and resettlement and contemporary interpretations. The result is a blending of practical historical concerns with contemporary nostalgia and romanticism, which often deepen the complexity of Appalachian cultural life.

Lost in Transition provides a nuanced and insightful study of removal and resettlement projects that applies critical analysis of fact, mythology, and storytelling. It illustrates the important role of place in southern Appalachian history. This collection is a helpful resource to anthropologists, folklorists, and Appalachian studies scholars, and a powerful volume of stories for all readers who reflect upon the importance of place and home.

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Maya Diaspora
Guatemalan Roots, New American Lives
edited by James Loucky and Marilyn M. Moors
Temple University Press, 2000
Maya people have lived for thousands of years in the mountains and forests of Guatemala, but they lost control of their land, becoming serfs and refugees, when the Spanish invaded in the sixteenth century. Under the Spanish and the Guatemalan non-Indian elites, they suffered enforced poverty as a resident source of cheap labor for non-Maya projects, particularly agriculture production. Following the CIA-induced coup that toppled Guatemala's elected government in 1954, their misery was exacerbated by government accommodation to United States "interests," which promoted crops for export and reinforced the need for cheap and passive labor.

This widespread poverty was endemic throughout northwestern Guatemala, where 80 percent of Maya children were chronically malnourished, and forced wide-scale migration to the Pacific coast. The self-help aid that flowed into the area in the 1960s and 1970s raised hopes for justice and equity that were brutally suppressed by Guatemala's military government. This military reprisal led to a massive diaspora of Maya throughout Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Central America.

This collection describes that process and the results. The chapters show the dangers and problems of the migratory/refugee process and the range of creative cultural adaptations that the Maya have developed. It provides the first comparative view of the formation and transformation of this new and expanding transnational population, presented from the standpoint of the migrants themselves as well as from a societal and international perspective. Together, the chapters furnish ethnographically grounded perspectives on the dynamic implications of uprooting and resettlement, social and psychological adjustment, long-term prospects for continued links to migration history from Guatemala, and the development of a sense of co-ethnicity with other indigenous people of Maya descent. As the Maya struggle to find their place in a more global society, their stories of quiet courage epitomize those of many other ethnic groups, migrants, and refugees today.
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Nationalizing the Russian Empire
The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I
Eric Lohr
Harvard University Press, 2003

In this compelling study of the treatment of "enemy" minorities in the Russian Empire during the First World War, Eric Lohr uncovers a dramatic story of mass deportations, purges, expropriations, and popular violence.A campaign initially aimed at restricting foreign citizens rapidly spun out of control. It swept up Russian subjects of German, Jewish, and Muslim backgrounds and drove roughly a million civilians from one part of the empire to another, resulting in one of the largest cases of forced migration in history to that time. Because foreigners and diaspora minorities were prominent among entrepreneurial and landowning elites, the campaign against them also became an explosive element in class and national tensions on the eve of the 1917 revolutions.

During the war, the imperial regime dropped its ambivalence about Russian nationalism and embraced unprecedented and radical policies that "nationalized" the economy, the land, and even the population. The core idea of the campaign--that the country needed to free itself from the domination of foreigners, internal enemies, and the exploitative world economic system--later became a central feature of the Soviet revolutionary model.

Based on extensive archival research, much in newly available sources, Nationalizing the Russian Empire is an important contribution to the study of empire and nationalism, the Russian Revolution, and ethnic cleansing.

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Night Spirits
The Story of the Relocation of the Sayisi Dene
Ila Bussidor
University of Manitoba Press, 1997
For over 1500 years, the Sayisi Dene, 'The Dene from the East', led an independent life, following the caribou herds and having little contact with white society. In 1956, an arbitrary government decision to relocate them catapulted the Sayisi Dene into the 20th century. It replaced their traditional nomadic life of hunting and fishing with a slum settlement on the outskirts of Churchill, Manitoba. Inadequately housed, without jobs, unfamiliar with the language or the culture, their independence and self-determination deteriorated into a tragic cycle of discrimination, poverty, alcoholism and violent death.By the early 1970s, the band realized they had to take their future into their own hands again. After searching for a suitable location, they set up a new community at Tadoule Lake, 250 miles north of Churchill. Today they run their own health, education and community programs. But the scars of the relocation will take years to heal, and Tadoule Lake is grappling with the problems of a people whose ties to the land, and to one another, have been tragically severed.In Night Spirits, the survivors, including those who were children at the time of the move, as well as the few remaining elders, recount their stories. They offer a stark and brutally honest account of the near-destruction of the Sayisi Dene, and their struggle to reclaim their lives. It is a dark story, told in hope.
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Oneida Indian Journey
From New York to Wisconsin, 1784–1860
Edited by Laurence M. Hauptman and L. Gordon McLester III
University of Wisconsin Press, 1999

For the first time, the traumatic removal of the Oneida Indians from New York to Wisconsin is examined in a groundbreaking collection of essays, The Oneida Indian Journey  from New York to Wisconsin, 1784–1860. To shed light on this vital period of Oneida history, editors Laurence Hauptman and L. Gordon McLester, III,  present a unique collaboration between an American Indian nation and the academic community. Two professional historians, a geographer, anthropologist, archivist and attorney join in with eighteen voices from the Oneida community—local historians, folklorists, genealogists, linguists, and tribal elders—discuss tribal dispossession and community; Oneida community perspectives of Oneida history; and the means of studying Oneida history.

Contributors include:  Debra Anderson, Eileen Antone, Jim Antone, Abrahms Archiquette, Oscar Archiquette, Jack Campisi, Richard Chrisjohn, Amelia Cornelius, Judy Cornelius, Katie Cornelius, Melissa Cornelius, Jonas Elm, James Folts, Reginald Horsman, Elizabeth Huff, Francis Jennings, Arlinda Locklear, Jo Margaret Mano, Loretta Metoxen, Liz Obomsawin, Jessie Peters, Sarah Summers, and Rachel Swamp

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Pathways of Desire
The Sexual Migration of Mexican Gay Men
Héctor Carrillo
University of Chicago Press, 2017
With Pathways of Desire, Héctor Carrillo brings us into the lives of Mexican gay men who have left their home country to pursue greater sexual autonomy and sexual freedom in the United States. The groundbreaking ethnographic study brings our attention to the full arc of these men’s migration experiences, from their upbringing in Mexican cities and towns, to their cross-border journeys, to their incorporation into urban gay communities in American cities, and their sexual and romantic relationships with American men. These men’s diverse and fascinating stories demonstrate the intertwining of sexual, economic, and familial motivations for migration.

Further, Carrillo shows that sexual globalization must be regarded as a bidirectional, albeit uneven, process of exchange between countries in the global north and the global south. With this approach, Carrillo challenges the view that gay men from countries like Mexico would logically want to migrate to a “more sexually enlightened” country like the United States—a partial and limited understanding, given the dynamic character of sexuality in countries such as Mexico, which are becoming more accepting of sexual diversity. Pathways of Desire also provides a helpful analytical framework for the simultaneous consideration of structural and cultural factors in social scientific studies of sexuality.  Carrillo explains the patterns of cross-cultural interaction that sexual migration generates and—at the most practical level—shows how the intricacies of cross-cultural sexual and romantic relations may affect the sexual health and HIV risk of transnational immigrant populations.
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The People of the Standing Stone
The Oneida Nation from the Revolution through the Era of Removal
Karim M. Tiro
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
Between 1765 and 1845, the Oneida Indian Nation weathered a trio of traumas: war, dispossession, and division. During the American War of Independence, the Oneidas became the revolutionaries' most important Indian allies. They undertook a difficult balancing act, helping the patriots while trying to avoid harming their Iroquois brethren. Despite the Oneidas' wartime service, they were dispossessed of nearly all their lands through treaties with the state of New York. In eighty years the Oneidas had gone from being an autonomous, powerful people in their ancestral homeland to being residents of disparate, politically exclusive reservation communities separated by up to nine hundred miles and completely surrounded by non-Indians.

The Oneidas' physical, political, and emotional division persists to this day. Even for those who stayed put, their world changed more in cultural, ecological, and demographic terms than at any time before or since. Oneidas of the post-Revolutionary decades were reluctant pioneers, undertaking more of the adaptations to colonized life than any other generation. Amid such wrenching change, maintaining continuity was itself a creative challenge. The story of that extraordinary endurance lies at the heart of this book.
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Recreating the Medieval Globe
Acts of Recycling, Revision, and Relocation
Joseph Shack
Arc Humanities Press, 2020
The creative reuse of materials, texts, and ideas was a common phenomenon in the medieval world. The seven chapters offer here a synchronic and diachronic consideration of the receptions and meanings of events and artifacts, analyzing the processes that allowed medieval works to remain relevant in sociocultural contexts far removed from those in which they originated. In the process, they elucidate the global valences of recycling, revision, and relocation throughout the interconnected Middle Ages, and their continued relevance for the shaping of modernity. The essays examine cases in the Arab and Muslim world, China and Mongolia, and the Prussian-Lithuanian frontier of eastern Europe.
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Relocating Eden
The Image and Politics of Inuit Exile in the Canadian Arctic
Alan Rudolph Marcus
Dartmouth College Press, 1995
In the early 1950s, a number of Inuit men, women, and children were loaded on ships and sent to live in the cold and barren lands of the Canadian High Arctic. Spurred by government agents’ promises of plentiful game, virgin land, and a lifestyle untainted by Western Influences, these “voluntary migrants,” who soon numbered nearly ninety, found instead isolation, hunting limited by game preserve regulations, three months of total darkness each winter, and a government suddenly deaf to their pleas to return home. The question, still unresolved forty years later, is whether these “experiments” were a well-intentioned governmental attempt to protect the Inuit way of life or a ploy to lure innocent people to exile, hunger, and deprivation in order to solidify Canada’s Cold War sovereignty in the far North. Alan Rudolph Marcus outlines the motives behind the relocation, case histories of two settlements, and the aftermath of the migration. Relocating Eden provides a timely and provocative inquiry into issues of continuing importance to Canada and all native peoples.
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Shame and Endurance
The Untold Story of the Chiricahua Apache Prisoners of War
H. Henrietta Stockel
University of Arizona Press, 2004
Many readers may be familiar with the wartime exploits of the Apaches; this book relates the untold story of their postwar fate. It tells of the Chiricahua Apaches’ 27 years of imprisonment as recorded in American dispatches, reports, and news items: documents that disclose the confusion, contradictions, and raw emotions expressed by government and military officials regarding the Apaches while revealing the shameful circumstances in which they were held.

First removed from Arizona to Florida, the prisoners were eventually relocated to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama, where, in the words of one Apache, "We didn’t know what misery was until they dumped us in those swamps." Pulmonary disease took its toll—by 1894, disease had killed nearly half of the Apaches—and after years of pressure from Indian rights activists and bureaucratic haggling, Fort Sill in Oklahoma was chosen as a more healthful location. Here they were given the opportunity to farm, and here Geronimo, who eventually converted to Christianity, died of pneumonia in 1909 at the age of 89, still a prisoner of war. In the meantime, many Apache children had been removed to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for education—despite earlier promises that families would not be split up—and most eventually lost their cultural identity.

Henrietta Stockel has combed public records to reconstruct this story of American shame and Native endurance. Unabashedly speaking on behalf of the Apaches, she has framed these documents within a readable narrative to show how exasperated public officials, eager to openly demonstrate their superiority over "savages" who had successfully challenged the American military for years, had little sympathy for the consequences of their confinement. Although the Chiricahua Apaches were not alone in losing their ancestral homelands, they were the only American Indians imprisoned for so long a time in an environment that continually exposed them to illnesses against which they had no immunity, devastating families even more than warfare. Shame and Endurance records events that ought never to be repeated—and tells a story that should never be forgotten.
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The Standing Bear Controversy
PRELUDE TO INDIAN REFORM
Valerie Sherer Mathes and Richard Lowitt
University of Illinois Press, 2003
In the spring of 1877 government officials forcibly removed members of the Ponca tribe from their homelands in the southeastern corner of Dakota territory, relocating them in the Indian Territory in Oklahoma. When Ponca Chief Standing Bear attempted to lead a group of his people home he was arrested, detained, and put on trial.
 
In this book Valerie Sherer Mathes and Richard Lowitt examine how the national publicity surrounding the trial of Chief Standing Bear, as well as a speaking tour by the chief and others, brought the plight of his tribe, and of tribespeople across America, to the attention of the general public, serving as a catalyst for the nineteenth-century Indian reform movement.
 
As the authors show, the eventual ramifications of the removal, flight, and trial of Standing Bear were extensive, and included the rise of an organized humanitarian reform movement, significant changes in the administration of Indian affairs, and the passage of the General Allotment Act in 1887.
 
This is the first full-length study of the Standing Bear trial and its consequences, and Mathes and Lowitt draw on a vast array of manuscript, diary, and journalistic sources in order to chronicle the events of 1877, as well as the effect the trial had on broader American popular opinion, on the federal government, and finally on the Native American population as a whole.
 
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Their Right to Speak
Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates
Alisse Portnoy
Harvard University Press, 2005

When Alisse Portnoy recovered petitions from the early 1830s that nearly 1,500 women sent to the U.S. Congress to protest the forced removal of Native Americans in the South, she found the first instance of women's national, collective political activism in American history. In this groundbreaking study, Portnoy links antebellum Indian removal debates with crucial, simultaneous debates about African Americans--abolition of slavery and African colonization--revealing ways European American women negotiated prohibitions to make their voices heard.

Situating the debates within contemporary, competing ideas about race, religion, and nation, Portnoy examines the means by which women argued for a "right to speak" on national policy. Women's participation in the debates was constrained not only by gender but also by how these women--and the men with whom they lived and worshipped--imagined Native and African Americans as the objects of their advocacy and by what they believed were the most benevolent ways to aid the oppressed groups.

Cogently argued and engagingly written, this is the first study to fully integrate women's, Native American, and African American rights debates.

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Transborder Lives
Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon
Lynn Stephen
Duke University Press, 2007
Lynn Stephen’s innovative ethnography follows indigenous Mexicans from two towns in the state of Oaxaca—the Mixtec community of San Agustín Atenango and the Zapotec community of Teotitlán del Valle—who periodically leave their homes in Mexico for extended periods of work in California and Oregon. Demonstrating that the line separating Mexico and the United States is only one among the many borders that these migrants repeatedly cross (including national, regional, cultural, ethnic, and class borders and divisions), Stephen advocates an ethnographic framework focused on transborder, rather than transnational, lives. Yet she does not disregard the state: She assesses the impact migration has had on local systems of government in both Mexico and the United States as well as the abilities of states to police and affect transborder communities.

Stephen weaves the personal histories and narratives of indigenous transborder migrants together with explorations of the larger structures that affect their lives. Taking into account U.S. immigration policies and the demands of both commercial agriculture and the service sectors, she chronicles how migrants experience and remember low-wage work in agriculture, landscaping, and childcare and how gender relations in Oaxaca and the United States are reconfigured by migration. She looks at the ways that racial and ethnic hierarchies inherited from the colonial era—hierarchies that debase Mexico’s indigenous groups—are reproduced within heterogeneous Mexican populations in the United States. Stephen provides case studies of four grass-roots organizations in which Mixtec migrants are involved, and she considers specific uses of digital technology by transborder communities. Ultimately Stephen demonstrates that transborder migrants are reshaping notions of territory and politics by developing creative models of governance, education, and economic development as well as ways of maintaining their cultures and languages across geographic distances.

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Travels with Tooy
History, Memory, and the African American Imagination
Richard Price
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Thirty-five years into his research among the descendants of rebel slaves living in the South American rain forest, anthropologist Richard Price encountered Tooy, a priest, philosopher, and healer living in a rough shantytown on the outskirts of Cayenne, French Guiana. Tooy is a time traveler who crosses boundaries between centuries, continents, the worlds of the living and the dead, and the visible and invisible. With an innovative blend of storytelling and scholarship, Travels with Tooy recounts the mutually enlightening and mind-expanding journeys of these two intellectuals.

Included on the itinerary for this hallucinatory expedition: forays into the eighteenth century to talk with slaves newly arrived from Africa; leaps into the midst of battles against colonial armies; close encounters with double agents and femme fatale forest spirits; and trips underwater to speak to the comely sea gods who control the world’s money supply. This enchanting book draws on Price’s long-term ethnographic and archival research, but above all on Tooy’s teachings, songs, stories, and secret languages to explore how Africans in the Americas have created marvelous new worlds of the imagination.
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Troubled Trails
The Meeker Affair and the Expulsion of Utes from Colorado
Robert Silbernagel
University of Utah Press, 2011

When U.S. Cavalry troops rode onto the Ute Indian Reservation in northwestern Colorado on September 29, 1879, they triggered a chain of events that cost the Utes their homeland: a deadly battle at Milk Creek, the killing of all men at the Indian agency headed by Nathan Meeker, and the taking of three women and two children who were held hostage for 23 days. The Utes didn’t seek a fight with the whites, most of whom they viewed as friends. However, powerful whites in Colorado wanted the Utes expelled. The Meeker affair was an opportunity to achieve that.

In Troubled Trails, Robert Silbernagel casts new light on the story of the Meeker Affair. Using details from historical interview transcripts and newspaper articles, he reveals the personalities of the major characters—both Indian and non-Indian. He tells the story from many perspectives, including that of Indian Agent Nathan Meeker; the U.S. military; Nicaagat, a leader of the White River Utes; and Josephine Meeker, Nathan Meeker’s daughter, who was held hostage by the Utes. Silbernagel took great pains to tell a complete story, even following on horseback the trail taken by the Utes. As a result, his book paints a multifaceted picture of what took place and, most importantly, his portrayal brings the Ute side of the story into focus.
 

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The View from Officers' Row
Army Perceptions of Western Indians
Sherry L. Smith
University of Arizona Press, 1990
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Capturing military men in contemplation rather than combat, Sherry L. Smith reveals American army officers' views about the Indians against whom they fought in the last half of the nineteenth century. She demonstrates that these officers—and their wives—did not share a monolithic, negative view of their enemies, but instead often developed a great respect for Indians and their cultures. Some officers even came to question Indian policy, expressed misgivings about their personal involvement in the Indian Wars, and openly sympathized with their foe.     
 
The book reviews the period 1848–1890—from the acquisition of the Mexican Cession to the Battle of Wounded Knee—and encompasses the entire trans-Mississippi West. Resting primarily on personal documents drawn from a representative sample of the officer corps at all levels, the study seeks to juxtapose the opinions of high-ranking officers with those of officers of lesser prominence, who were perhaps less inclined to express personal opinions in official reports.   
 
No educated segment of American society had more prolonged contact with Indians than did army officers and their wives, yet not until now has such an overview of their attitudes been presented. Smith's work demolishes the stereotype of the Indian-hating officer and broadens our understanding of the role of the army in the American West.
 
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White Man's Heaven
The Lynching and Expulsion of Blacks in the Southern Ozarks, 1894-1909
Kimberly Harper
University of Arkansas Press, 2010
White Man's Heaven is the first book to investigate the lynching and expulsion of African Americans in the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kimberly Harper shows how an established tradition of extralegal violence and the rapid political, economic, and social change of the New South era combined to create an environment that resulted in interracial violence. Even though some whites tried to stop the violence and bring the lynchers to justice, many African Americans fled the Ozarks, leaving only a resilient few behind and forever changing the racial composition of the region.
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Women, America, and Movement
Narratives of Relocation
Edited & Intro by Susan L. Roberson
University of Missouri Press, 1998

Since the colonial days, American women have traveled, migrated, and relocated, always faced with the challenge of reconstructing their homes for themselves and their families. Women, America, and Movement offers a journey through largely unexplored territory—the experiences of migrating American women. These narratives, both real and imagined, represent a range of personal and critical perspectives; some of the women describe their travels as expansive and freeing, while others relate the dreadful costs and sacrifices of relocating.

Despite the range of essays featured in this study, the writings all coalesce around the issues of politics, poetry, and self- identity described by Adrienne Rich as the elements of the "politics of location," treated here as the politics of relocation. The narratives featured in this book explore the impact of race, class, and sexual economics on migratory women, their self-identity, and their roles in family and social life. These issues demonstrate that in addition to geographic place, ideology is itself a space to be traversed.

By examining the writings of such women as Louise Erdrich, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gertrude Stein, the essayists included in this volume offer a variety of experiences. The book confronts such issues as racist politicking against Native Americans, African Americans, and Asian immigrants; sexist attitudes that limit women to the roles of wife, mother, and sexual object; and exploitation of migrants from Appalachia and of women newly arrived in America.

These essays also delve into the writings themselves by looking at what happens to narrative structure as authors or their characters cross geographic boundaries. The reader sees how women writers negotiate relocation in their texts and how the written word becomes a place where one finds oneself.

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