338 books match the query 'Indigenous Studies' and 25 start with a

cover of A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity: Language, Social Practice, and Identity within Puerto Rican Taíno Activism

A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity

Language, Social Practice, and Identity within Puerto Rican Taíno Activism

Sherina Feliciano-Santos

Rutgers University Press, 2021

A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity is an in-depth analysis of the debates surrounding Taíno/Boricua activism in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean diaspora in New York City. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research, media analysis, and historical documents, the book explores the varied experiences and motivations of Taíno/Boricua activists as well as the alternative fonts of authority they draw on to claim what is commonly thought to be an extinct ethnic category. It explores the historical and interactional challenges involved in claiming membership in, what for many Puerto Ricans, is an impossible affiliation. In focusing on Taíno/Boricua activism, the books aims to identify a critical space from which to analyze and decolonize ethnoracial ideologies of Puerto Ricanness, issues of class and education, Puerto Rican nationalisms and colonialisms, as well as important questions regarding narrative, historical memory, and belonging.
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cover of A Diné History of Navajoland

A Diné History of Navajoland

Klara Kelley and Harris Francis

University of Arizona Press, 2019

For the first time, a sweeping history of the Diné that is foregrounded in oral tradition. Authors Klara Kelley and Harris Francis share Diné history from pre-Columbian time to the present, using ethnographic interviews in which Navajo people reveal their oral histories on key events such as Athabaskan migrations, trading and trails, Diné clans, the Long Walk of 1864, and the struggle to keep their culture alive under colonizers who brought the railroad, coal mining, trading posts, and, finally, climate change.

The early chapters, based on ceremonial origin stories, tell about Diné forebears. Next come the histories of Diné clans from late pre-Columbian to early post-Columbian times, and the coming together of the Diné as a sovereign people. Later chapters are based on histories of families, individuals, and communities, and tell how the Diné have struggled to keep their bond with the land under settler encroachment, relocation, loss of land-based self-­sufficiency through the trading-post system, energy resource extraction, and climate change.

Archaeological and documentary information supplements the oral histories, providing a comprehensive investigation of Navajo history and offering new insights into their twentieth-century relationships with Hispanic and Anglo settlers.

For Diné readers, the book offers empowering histories and stories of Diné cultural sovereignty. “In short,” the authors say, “it may help you to know how you came to be where—and who—you are.”
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cover of A Key into the Language of America: The Tomaquag Museum Edition

A Key into the Language of America

The Tomaquag Museum Edition

Roger Williams

Westholme Publishing, 2019

A New Edition of One of the Most Important Cultural Artifacts of European and Indigenous American Contact
Roger Williams’s Key into the Language of America, first published in 1643, is one of the most important artifacts of early Indigenous American culture. In it, Williams recorded the day-to-day experience of the Narragansett people of Rhode Island in their own words, the first documentation of an American Indian language in English. Williams’s Key can be read at many levels because of its historical, literary, political, and religious significance. Its greatest value, though, is its intimate portrait of the Narragansett and their linguistic neighbors in the early years of European colonial settlement, before disease, dislocation, warfare—in particular, King Philip’s War—and colonial interference had diminished their population and power in the region. An extraordinary achievement, Williams’s Key gives us a contemporary account of Narragansett family life, of their sociability and skill in business, their dress, foodways, and the farming, fishing, and hunting that formed the basis of their sustenance practices. 
This new Tomaquag Museum edition includes for the first time cultural commentary provided by the Narragansett Tribe as well as modern linguistic information provided by a leading authority in the study of American Indian languages. 
The Tomaquag Museum, located in Exeter, Rhode Island, is an Indigenous nonprofit organization dedicated to sharing the culture, arts, and history of the Narragansett and other tribal communities of southern New England.
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cover of A Land of Ghosts: The Braided Lives of People and the Forest in Far Western Amazonia

A Land of Ghosts

The Braided Lives of People and the Forest in Far Western Amazonia

Campbell, David G

Rutgers University Press, 2007

For thirty years David G. Campbell has explored the Amazon, an enchanting terrain of forest and river that is home to the greatest diversity of plants and animals to have ever existed, anywhere at any time, during the four-billion-year history of life on Earth.

With great artistic flair, Campbell describes a journey up the Rio Moa, a remote tributary of the Amazon River, 2,800 miles from its mouth. Here he joins three old friends: Arito, a caiman hunter turned paleontologist; Tarzan, a street urchin brought up in a bordello; and Pimentel, a master canoe pilot. They travel together deep into the rainforest and set up camp in order to survey every woody plant on a two-hectare plot of land with about as many tree species as in all of North America.

Campbell introduces us to two remarkable women, Dona Cabocla, a widow who raised six children on that lonely frontier, and Dona Ausira, a Nokini Native American who is the last speaker of her tribe's ages-old language. These pioneers live in a land whose original inhabitants were wiped out by centuries of disease, slavery, and genocide, taking their traditions and languages with them. He explores the intimate relationship between the extinction of native language and the extirpation of biological diversity. "It's hard for a people to love a place that is not defined in words and thus cannot be understood. And it's easy to give away something for which there are no words, something you never knew existed."

In elegant prose that enchants and entrances, Campbell has written an elegy for the Amazon forest and its peoples-for what has become a land of ghosts.

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cover of A New Deal for Navajo Weaving: Reform and Revival of Diné Textiles

A New Deal for Navajo Weaving

Reform and Revival of Diné Textiles

Jennifer McLerran

University of Arizona Press, 2022

A New Deal for Navajo Weaving provides a detailed history of early to mid-twentieth-century Diné weaving projects by non-Natives who sought to improve the quality and marketability of Navajo weaving but in so doing failed to understand the cultural significance of weaving and its role in the lives of Diné women.

By the 1920s the durability and market value of Diné weavings had declined dramatically. Indian welfare advocates established projects aimed at improving the materials and techniques. Private efforts served as models for federal programs instituted by New Deal administrators. Historian Jennifer McLerran details how federal officials developed programs such as the Southwest Range and Sheep Breeding Laboratory at Fort Wingate in New Mexico and the Navajo Arts and Crafts Guild. Other federal efforts included the publication of Native natural dye recipes; the publication of portfolios of weaving designs to guide artisans; and the education of consumers through the exhibition of weavings, aiding them in their purchases and cultivating an upscale market. McLerran details how government officials sought to use these programs to bring the Diné into the national economy; instead, these federal tactics were ineffective because they marginalized Navajo women and ignored the important role weaving plays in the resilience and endurance of wider Diné culture.
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cover of A World You Do Not Know: Settler Societies, Indigenous Peoples and the Attack on Cultural Diversity

A World You Do Not Know

Settler Societies, Indigenous Peoples and the Attack on Cultural Diversity

Colin Samson

University of London Press, 2014

Lists over 3,500 theses in progress on 1 January 2017 in both history and other departments, classified according to period and area Gives full details of title, supervisor and university Helps postgraduate students to select a topic and a supervisor, to publicise their topic and to discover others working in related fields Provides an overview of the amount and variety of current historical research for higher degrees
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cover of Acoustic Colonialism: Acts of Mapuche Interference

Acoustic Colonialism

Acts of Mapuche Interference

Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante

Duke University Press, 2025

In Acoustic Colonialism, Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante examines the role of sound in Chilean and Mapuche cultural production over the last two centuries. Cárcamo-Huechante theorizes sound as a territory of racial, patriarchal, and colonial hegemony as well as of Mapuche struggle, agency, and response to what he calls "acoustic colonialism." From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Chilean literature, radio, and other media have exerted a historic role in disseminating distorted visual and sonic representations of the Mapuche. The enduring effects of what Cárcamo-Huechante defines as the colonial ear—the entry point for these misrepresentations—reflect the logic of the Chilean settler nation-state. In response to these aural and sonorous figurations, contemporary Mapuche writers, artists, and activists have produced their own literary, radiophonic, vocal, and musical expressions. The voices, sounds, and discourses of these Mapuche productions contest and disrupt the acoustic colonialism that has dominated the soundscape of the territory designated in present-day cartography as central and southern Chile. 
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cover of Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400–1900

Across a Great Divide

Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400–1900

Edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell

University of Arizona Press, 2010

Archaeological research is uniquely positioned to show how native history and native culture affected the course of colonial interaction, but to do so it must transcend colonialist ideas about Native American technological and social change. This book applies that insight to five hundred years of native history. Using data from a wide variety of geographical, temporal, and cultural settings, the contributors examine economic, social, and political stability and transformation in indigenous societies before and after the advent of Europeans and document the diversity of native colonial experiences. The book’s case studies range widely, from sixteenth-century Florida, to the Great Plains, to nineteenth-century coastal Alaska.

The contributors address a series of interlocking themes. Several consider the role of indigenous agency in the processes of colonial interaction, paying particular attention to gender and status. Others examine the ways long-standing native political economies affected, and were in turn affected by, colonial interaction. A third group explores colonial-period ethnogenesis, emphasizing the emergence of new native social identities and relations after 1500. The book also highlights tensions between the detailed study of local cases and the search for global processes, a recurrent theme in postcolonial research.

If archaeologists are to bridge the artificial divide separating history from prehistory, they must overturn a whole range of colonial ideas about American Indians and their history. This book shows that empirical archaeological research can help replace long-standing models of indigenous culture change rooted in colonialist narratives with more nuanced, multilinear models of change—and play a major role in decolonizing knowledge about native peoples.
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cover of Alaska Native Cultures and Issues: Responses to Frequently Asked Questions

Alaska Native Cultures and Issues

Responses to Frequently Asked Questions

Edited by Libby Roderick

University of Alaska Press, 2010

Making up more than ten percent of Alaska's population, Native Alaskans are the state's largest minority group. Yet most non-Native Alaskans know surprisingly little about the histories and cultures of their indigenous neighbors, or about the important issues they face. This concise book compiles frequently asked questions and provides informative and accessible responses that shed light on some common misconceptions. With responses composed by scholars within the represented communities and reviewed by a panel of experts, this easy-to-read compendium aims to facilitate a deeper exploration and richer discussion of the complex and compelling issues that are part of Alaska Native life today.
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cover of All of Us or None: Migrant Organizing in an Era of Deportation and Dispossession

All of Us or None

Migrant Organizing in an Era of Deportation and Dispossession

Monisha Das Gupta

Duke University Press, 2024

In All of Us or None, Monisha Das Gupta tells the story of contemporary antideportation organizing in the United States by migrants and refugees labeled as criminal aliens. These activists, who live daily with criminalization, work against forms of deportation that Das Gupta calls settler carcerality—the United States’ use of deportation to exert territorial control in the face of Indigenous self-determination. Drawing on fieldwork with antideportation organizing groups in New York, Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Honolulu, Das Gupta documents the inventive methods of struggle against settler carcerality. Das Gupta shows how the organizers’ actions and visions depart from the settler colonial nature of the mainstream demands for a pathway to citizenship and civil rights. Through direct action, storytelling, political education, and youth and queer leadership, these organizations and collectives conceptualize an abolitionist vision of migration justice that rejects the settler state and encompasses all those who are disavowed. By highlighting this work, Das Gupta demonstrates the transformative promise offered by a dissident migrant-led politics working toward dismantling settler structures and logics.
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cover of Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism

Aloha Betrayed

Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism

Noenoe K. Silva

Duke University Press, 2004

In 1897, as a white oligarchy made plans to allow the United States to annex Hawai'i, native Hawaiians organized a massive petition drive to protest. Ninety-five percent of the native population signed the petition, causing the annexation treaty to fail in the U.S. Senate. This event was unknown to many contemporary Hawaiians until Noenoe K. Silva rediscovered the petition in the process of researching this book. With few exceptions, histories of Hawai'i have been based exclusively on English-language sources. They have not taken into account the thousands of pages of newspapers, books, and letters written in the mother tongue of native Hawaiians. By rigorously analyzing many of these documents, Silva fills a crucial gap in the historical record. In so doing, she refutes the long-held idea that native Hawaiians passively accepted the erosion of their culture and loss of their nation, showing that they actively resisted political, economic, linguistic, and cultural domination. Drawing on Hawaiian-language texts, primarily newspapers produced in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, Silva demonstrates that print media was central to social communication, political organizing, and the perpetuation of Hawaiian language and culture. A powerful critique of colonial historiography, Aloha Betrayed provides a much-needed history of native Hawaiian resistance to American imperialism.
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cover of Alternative Maternities: Bodies, Death, and Argentine Citizenship Since 1820

Alternative Maternities

Bodies, Death, and Argentine Citizenship Since 1820

Madison Felman-Panagotacos

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Alternative Maternities: Bodies, Death, and Argentine Citizenship Since 1820 interrogates the intimate and symbolic relationship between maternity and nationhood in Argentina through the lens of post-mortem maternal bodies. This interdisciplinary study brings together literary analysis, archival research, visual culture, and political history to examine how cultural productions deploy the image of the dead mother to define — and challenge — the boundaries of Argentine citizenship, especially for women, trans/travesti individuals, and those of Indigenous heritage. It focuses on the 200-year period between independence in 1820, when Argentine identity began to be defined, until the legalization of abortion at the end of 2020, which codified the right to non-maternity.

By tracing hagiographic and sacrificial depictions of figures like La Difunta Correa and Eva Perón across poetry, literature, visual art, and contemporary protest culture, the book reveals how narratives of Republican Motherhood continue to structure political and social belonging. Ultimately, this work shows how contemporary artists and authors are reconfiguring these maternal myths to queer, expand, and decolonize national identity.

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cover of American Indian History on Trial: Historical Expertise in Tribal Litigation

American Indian History on Trial

Historical Expertise in Tribal Litigation

E. Richard Hart

University of Utah Press, 2017

Drawing from forty-five years of experience, E. Richard Hart elucidates the use of history as expert testimony in American Indian tribal litigation. Such lawsuits deal with aboriginal territory; hunting, fishing, and plant gathering rights; reservation boundaries; water rights; federal recognition; and other questions that have a historical basis. The methodology necessary to assemble successful expert testimony for tribes is complex and demanding and the legal cases have serious implications for many thousands of people, perhaps for generations.

Hart, a historian who has testified in cases that have resulted in roughly a billion dollars in judgments, uses specific cases to explain at length what kind of historical research and documentation is necessary for tribes seeking to protect and claim their rights under United States law. He demonstrates the legal questions that Native Americans face by exploring the cultural history and legal struggles of six Indian nations. He recounts how these were addressed by expert testimony grounded in thorough historical understanding, research, and argumentation. The case studies focus on the Wenatchi, Coeur d’Alene, Hualapai, Amah Mutsun, Klamath, and Zuni peoples but address issues relevant to many American tribes. 
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cover of American Indian Studies: Native PhD Graduates Gift Their Stories

American Indian Studies

Native PhD Graduates Gift Their Stories

Edited by Mark L. M. Blair, Mary Jo Tippeconnic Fox, and Kestrel A. Smith

University of Arizona Press, 2022

In American Indian Studies, Native PhD graduates share their personal stories about their educational experiences and how doctoral education has shaped their identities, lives, relationships, and careers.

This collection of personal narratives from Native graduates of the University of Arizona’s American Indian Studies (AIS) doctoral program, the first such program of its kind, gifts stories of endurance and resiliency, hardship and struggle, and accomplishment and success. It provides insight into the diverse and dynamic experiences of Native graduate students. The narratives address family and kinship, mentorship, and service and giving back. Essayists share the benefits of having an AIS program at a mainstream academic institution—not just for the students enrolled but also for their communities.

This book offers Native students aspiring to a PhD a realistic picture of what it takes. While each student has their own path to walk, these stories provide the gift of encouragement and serve to empower Native students to reach their educational goals, whether it be in an AIS program or other fields of study.

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cover of Among the Garifuna: Family Tales and Ethnography from the Caribbean Coast

Among the Garifuna

Family Tales and Ethnography from the Caribbean Coast

Marilyn McKillop Wells

University of Alabama Press, 2015

An intimate ethnographic narrative of one indigenous family in the twentieth-century Caribbean

Among the Garifuna is the first ethnographic narrative of a Garifuna family. The Garifuna are descendants of the “Black Carib,” whom the British deposited on Roatan Island in 1797 and who settled along the Caribbean coast from Belize City to Nicaragua.

In 1980, medical anthropologist Marilyn McKillop Wells found herself embarking on an “improbable journey” when she was invited to the area to do fieldwork with the added challenge of revealing the “real” Garifuna. Upon her arrival on the island, Wells was warmly embraced by a local family, the Diegos, and set to work recording life events and indigenous perspectives on polygyny, Afro-indigenous identity, ancestor-worshiping religion, and more. The result, as represented in Among the Garifuna, is a lovingly intimate, earthy human drama.

The family narrative is organized chronologically. Part I, “The Old Ways,” consists of vignettes that introduce the family backstory with dialogue as imagined by Wells based on the family history she was told. We meet the family progenitors, Margaret and Cervantes Diego, during their courtship, experience Margaret’s pain as Cervantes takes a second wife, witness the death of Cervantes and ensuing mourning rituals, follow the return of Margaret and the children to their previous home in British Honduras, and observe the emergence of the children’s personalities.

In Part II, “Living There,” Wells continues the story when she arrives in Belize and meets the Diego children, including the major protagonist, Tas. In Tas’s household Wells learns about foods and manners and watches family squabbles and reconciliations. In these mini-stories, Wells interweaves cultural information on the Garifuna people with first-person narrative and transcription of their words, assembling these into an enthralling slice of life. Part III, “The Ancestor Party,” takes the reader through a fascinating postmortem ritual that is enacted to facilitate the journey of the spirits of the honored ancestors to the supreme supernatural.

Among the Garifuna contributes to the literary genres of narrative anthropology and feminist ethnography in the tradition of Zora Neal Hurston and other women writing culture in a personal way. Wells’s portrait of this Garifuna family will be of interest to anthropologists, Caribbeanists, Latin Americanists, students, and general readers alike.
 

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cover of Angalkut/Shamans in Yup'ik Oral Tradition

Angalkut/Shamans in Yup'ik Oral Tradition

Ann Fienup-Riordan

University of Alaska Press, 2025

Angalkut/Shamans in Yup’ik Oral Tradition collects over thirty years’ worth of shaman stories, told as part of gatherings organized by Calista Education and Culture to document Yup’ik traditional knowledge. These conversations highlight the critical role angalkut played in Yup’ik life—healing the sick, interpreting dreams and unusual experiences, requesting future abundance through masked dances and other ceremonies, protecting the lives of young children, and dealing with the dead.
 
The book begins with an English introduction that places Yup’ik oral traditions in the context of shamanism in Alaska and other parts of the Arctic. Then first-person accounts presented in the original Yup’ik with accompanying English translations discuss the importance of shamans and shamanism in general, good and bad shamans, and shamans as healers. Narratives from Nelson Island, Canineq, Kuskokwim River, Akulmiut, and Yukon River describe shamans as healers, shaman journeys and performances, shamans and masked dances requesting abundance, shamans and the dead, malicious shamans, shaman confrontations, becoming a shaman, and those who have shaman abilities today. A detailed glossary and references are also included.
 
Today, not only are these angalkut gone, but so are those who witnessed and participated in their activities. Angalkut/Shamans in Yup’ik Oral Tradition is the first book devoted exclusively to Yup’ik angalkut; never before has the variety of angalkut roles been profiled in publication, including the richness of elders’ recollections of these individuals and their roles. There is great value in the stories they left behind. This fine-grained presentation of unique, bilingual first-person narratives is an essential resource for scholars and students interested in Yup’ik heritage, Yugtun language, shaman ethnography, and Alaska Native oral traditions.
 
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cover of Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West

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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cover of Apalachicola Valley Archaeology, Volume 1: Prehistory through the Middle Woodland Period

Apalachicola Valley Archaeology, Volume 1

Prehistory through the Middle Woodland Period

Nancy Marie White

University of Alabama Press, 2024

The definitive archaeological record and what is known or speculated about the ancient Apalachicola and lower Chattahoochee Valley region of northwest Florida, southeast Alabama, and southwest Georgia.

In this meticulously researched volume, Nancy Marie White provides a major holistic synthesis of the archaeological record and what is known or surmised about the peoples of the Apalachicola and lower Chattahoochee Valley region of northwest Florida, southeast Alabama, and southwest Georgia. White transforms a neglected research area into a lively saga that spans the time of the first human settlement, around 14,000 years ago, through the Middle Woodland period, ending about AD 700.

White reveals that Paleoindian habitation was more extensive than once surmised. Archaic sites were widespread, and those societies persisted when the Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago. Pottery appeared in the Late Archaic period (before 4000 BP), and Early Woodland–period burial mounds demonstrate a flowering of religious and ritual systems. Middle Woodland societies expanded this mortuary ceremony, and the complex pottery of the Swift Creek and the early Weeden Island ceramic series show an increased fascination with the ornate and unusual. Yet, basic Native American lifeways continued with gathering-fishing-hunting subsistence traditions similar to those of their ancestors.

This volume and its companion form the definitive work on the Apalachicola–lower Chattahoochee Valley region for both scholars and general readers interested in Native Americans of the Southeast.

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cover of Apalachicola Valley Archaeology, Volume 2: The Late Woodland Period through Recent History

Apalachicola Valley Archaeology, Volume 2

The Late Woodland Period through Recent History

Nancy Marie White

University of Alabama Press, 0

A comprehensive synthesis tracing 1,300 years of cultural transformation in the Apalachicola–lower Chattahoochee Valley, from Late Woodland societies to the modern era.

Apalachicola Valley Archaeology: The Late Woodland Period through Recent History, Volume 2, synthesizes the archaeology and history of the Native Americans, African Americans, and Euro-Americans of the Apalachicola–lower Chattahoochee Valley region of northwest Florida, southeast Alabama, and southwest Georgia from about 1300 years ago until the present. The region extends from Columbia, Alabama, to the Gulf of Mexico. It is culturally and environmentally distinct but little known archaeologically because it crosses historic political boundaries at the frontier.

Early chapters overview the environment and archaeology. Coverage then surveys time periods, from the Late Woodland to present. Topics include settlement, archaeological findings and material culture, subsistence and seasonality, history, sociopolitical systems, and peoples.

White’s prodigious work reveals that the prehistoric Late Woodland cultures who developed maize agriculture developed into Fort Walton chiefdoms. Post-invasion and Spanish and British colonization, these peoples were replaced by consolidated groups of Native American survivors and maroons moving around the region. These multiethnic societies with blended material cultures developed new identities, living at the edges of colonial territories. Creek societies, many becoming Seminoles, fought on all sides of European and American conflicts until most Indians were forcibly removed in the 1830s. Then the region became important for cotton, cattle, and timber, which were often produced by enslaved labor and transported by steamboat. Later expansion of agriculture and silviculture, as well as turpentine, tupelo honey, and other industries, left material evidence. The usefulness of the information to modern society is noted. Copious illustrations enhance the scientific analyses and the telling of the human stories.

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cover of Arrows Tipped with Flowers: Threshold Theory for Transformative Learning

Arrows Tipped with Flowers

Threshold Theory for Transformative Learning

Julie Geredien

University of Illinois Press, 2026

How can learning at the threshold change us and our world? Julie Geredien introduces an approach to transformative learning that draws on a wide range of cultural and disciplinary viewpoints.

Threshold theory challenges unexamined mental habits and exposes absolutisms that hold social order by impeding the comprehension process. As those learning at the threshold approach transition and the unknown, they participate in transformations that illuminate hidden developmental patterns and ecological relationships. Geredien’s threshold theorizing brings together realities at the heart of creativity, relational worldview, and anti-oppression work to forge the philosophical and psychological foundations necessary to reshape policies and practices.

Innovative and expansive, Arrows Tipped with Flowers reveals the psychology of integrity that underpins truly global learning and explains the need to develop more inclusive and reflective approaches to knowledge formation.
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cover of Artificial Intelligence, Art and Indigeneity: Between Dreams and Hallucinations

Artificial Intelligence, Art and Indigeneity

Between Dreams and Hallucinations

Edited by Thea Pitman, Sandra De Berduccy, and Andreas Rauh

University of London Press, 2026

This book explores the cultural and ethical implications of generative AI through the lens of Indigenous visual culture in Latin America. 

Responding to the rise of tools like DALL·E 2 and Midjourney, this groundbreaking volume documents the AIAI project (2023–), which invited a group of Indigenous artists and writers from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Peru to critically engage with image generation technologies. Through collaborative experimentation with a range of both commercial and bespoke tools, contributors reflect on the promises and pitfalls of AI—from its potential for ‘dreaming,’ for imagining Indigenous futures, to the frustration of its ability to ‘hallucinate,’ to distort, and misrepresent Indigenous cultures.

Bringing together artists, writers, and scholars, the book challenges dominant narratives around AI and representation, using a decolonial framework rooted in Indigenous epistemologies. Structured in three parts—context and theory, creative reflections, and generative critique—it foregrounds multivocal and multilingual perspectives, resisting homogenization and reframing participatory research. This is the first book-length study of generative AI’s impact on Indigenous visual culture in Latin America, making a timely and vital contribution to global debates on AI, art, and cultural sovereignty.

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cover of Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory

Asegi Stories

Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory

Qwo-Li Driskill

University of Arizona Press, 2016

In Cherokee Asegi udanto refers to people who either fall outside of men’s and women’s roles or who mix men’s and women’s roles. Asegi, which translates as “strange,” is also used by some Cherokees as a term similar to “queer.” For author Qwo-Li Driskill, asegi provides a means by which to reread Cherokee history in order to listen for those stories rendered “strange” by colonial heteropatriarchy.

As the first full-length work of scholarship to develop a tribally specific Indigenous Queer or Two-Spirit critique, Asegi Stories examines gender and sexuality in Cherokee cultural memory, how they shape the present, and how they can influence the future.

The theoretical and methodological underpinnings of Asegi Stories derive from activist, artistic, and intellectual genealogies, referred to as “dissent lines” by Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Driskill intertwines Cherokee and other Indigenous traditions, women of color feminisms, grassroots activisms, queer and Trans studies and politics, rhetoric, Native studies, and decolonial politics. Drawing from oral histories and archival documents in order to articulate Cherokee-centered Two-Spirit critiques, Driskill contributes to the larger intertribal movements for social justice.
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cover of At the Hearth of the Crossed Races: A French-Indian Community in Nineteenth-Century Oregon, 1812-1859

At the Hearth of the Crossed Races

A French-Indian Community in Nineteenth-Century Oregon, 1812-1859

Melinda Marie Jetté

Oregon State University Press, 2015

Despite the force of Oregon’s founding mythology, the Willamette Valley was not an empty Eden awaiting settlement by hardy American pioneers. Rather, it was, as Melinda Jetté explores in At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, one of the earliest sites of extensive intercultural contact in the Pacific Northwest.

Jetté’s study focuses on the “hearth” of this contact: French Prairie, so named for the French-Indian families who resettled the homeland of the Ahantchuyuk Kalapuyans. Although these families sought a middle course in their relations with their various neighbors, their presence ultimately contributed to the Anglo-American colonization of the region. By establishing farming and husbandry operations in the valley, the French-Indian settlers enhanced the Willamette Valley’s appeal as a destination of choice for the Anglo-Americans who later emigrated to the Pacific Northwest via the Oregon Trail.

Upon these emigrants’ arrival, the social space for the people of the “crossed races” diminished considerably, as the Anglo-Americans instituted a system of settler colonialism based on racial exclusion. Like their Native kin, the French-Indian families pursued various strategies to navigate the changing times and Jetté’s study of French Prairie takes on the relationships among all three: the French-Indian families, the indigenous peoples, and the Anglo-American settlers.  

With At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, Jetté delivers a social history that deepens our understanding of the Oregon Country in the nineteenth century. This history of French Prairie provides a window into the multi-racial history of the Pacific Northwest and offers an alternative vision of early Oregon in the lives of the biracial French-Indian families whose community challenged notions of white supremacy, racial separation, and social exclusion.
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cover of Au Te Waate / We Remember It: Hiaki Survival Through a Bitter War

Au Te Waate / We Remember It

Hiaki Survival Through a Bitter War

Maria Fernanda Leyva; Edited by Heidi Harley

University of Arizona Press, 2025

This compelling work delves into the personal narratives of Hiaki (Yaqui) individuals who endured the tumultuous period from 1900 to 1930, when they faced systematic attacks, conscription, deportation, and enslavement under Mexican government policies. Presented in both the original Hiaki language and English translation, these accounts offer an unparalleled glimpse into the lives of those who resisted and survived the era’s harsh realities. The narratives describe military engagements, the struggles of refugee life, forced labor, and the resilience of families under extreme duress. This work provides a unique and unvarnished account of the impacts of Mexican colonialism and aggression on individuals and families, completely from the Hiaki perspective.

Au Te Waate / We Remember It is not just a historical account but a linguistic treasure, preserving the naturally produced speech of five Hiaki speakers from a previous era. Transcriptions of interviews recorded by author Maria Fernanda Leyva with family members and friends provide invaluable insights into the Hiaki language. The interviews document and preserve the narrative styles, vocabulary, and grammatical constructions of the time.

This work also serves as a crucial resource for scholars of linguistics and history alike, capturing dialect variation and illustrating the linguistic evolution of the Hiaki community. Additionally, for Hiaki people studying their own language, this book stands as a rich repository of cultural and linguistic heritage, meticulously maintained through side-by-side translations and contextual historical introductions.

The narratives in this book are anchored by the experiences of five Hiaki speakers, whose stories of displacement, survival, and resistance provide a deeply personal perspective on the broader historical events of the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship and the early years of the Mexican Revolution. Au Te Waate / We Remember It stands as an important record, preserving these critical voices for future generations and offering profound insights into the resilience of the Hiaki people.


 
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cover of Aztec Music and Dance in California

Aztec Music and Dance in California

Kristina F. Nielsen

University of Illinois Press, 2026

A powerful expression of Indigenous and Mexican identity, Aztec dance has become a part of Mexican and Mexican American cultural life across North America. Kristina F. Nielsen examines California’s Aztec dance communities to illuminate how the dancers interpret authenticity, tradition, history, and Indigenous and national identities through their music and dance practices. Merging history with on-the-ground interviews, Nielsen looks at the different approaches to Aztec dance. Some dancers maintain practices as they have been passed down through lineages of hybrid Indigenous and Catholic practices. Others strive to restore traditions to what they believe they were in the early 1500s. Nielsen’s analysis examines Mexican and Mexican American understandings of Indigenous histories that inform these decisions by Aztec dancers, and considers the ways they intersect with decolonization in the United States. Enlightening and rigorous, Aztec Music and Dance in California takes readers into the dynamic world of an ever-evolving art form.
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