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Uncovering how and where Indigenous and settler communities found common ground using newly public church records

Puritans in the American colonies created Congregationalism, a Protestant denomination where power rested in each congregation rather than a larger central body. As has often been told, the official Puritan mission included outreach to Indigenous people. This may appear as nothing more than forced conversion under colonization, but church records from Massachusetts—digitized and made public for the first time—reveal the authenticity of this Indigenous religious experience, as evidenced by commonalities between the Congregational way and some aspects of local Native American cultures. The records also show how the decentralized churches stood in contrast to a growing civil government in the colonies.

Lori Rogers-Stokes focuses on the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the decades around the turn of the eighteenth century, a period bookended by King Philip’s War and the First Great Awakening. She uses as her primary source the many records kept by individual Congregational churches of the time. These records, accumulated over generations, have been missing from the historical record, allowing overly simplistic accounts of this religious community to circulate. With church records now available, Rogers-Stokes reveals a more realistic picture of diverse congregations and contrasts their internal workings—which show inherent flexibility and a focus on a shared creation of community—with a developing civil government focused on consolidating power around white landowners. The result is a story that can expand how scholars write about this period, this region, and these communities, both settler and Indigenous.

What are the limits of political solidarity, and how can visual culture contribute to social change?

A fundamental dilemma exists in documentary photography: can white artists successfully portray Indigenous lives and communities in a manner that neither appropriates nor romanticizes them? With an attentive and sensitive eye, Louise Siddons examines lesbian photographer Laura Gilpin’s classic 1968 book The Enduring Navaho to illuminate the intersectional politics of photography, Navajo sovereignty, and queerness over the course of the twentieth century.

Gilpin was a New York–trained fine arts photographer who started working with Navajo people when her partner accepted a job as a nurse in Arizona. She spent more than three decades documenting Navajo life and creating her book in collaboration with Navajo friends and colleagues. Framing her lesbian identity and her long relationship with the Navajo people around questions of allyship, Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon addresses the long and problematic history of White photographers capturing images of Native life. Simultaneously, Siddons uses Gilpin’s work to explore the limitations of White advocacy in a political moment that emphasized the need for Indigenous visibility and voices.

Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon introduces contemporary Diné (Navajo) artists as interlocutors, critics, and activists whose work embodies and extends the cultural sovereignty politics of earlier generations and makes visible the queerness often left implicit in Gilpin’s photographs. Siddons puts their work in conversation with Gilpin’s, taking up her mandate to viewers and readers of The Enduring Navajo to address Navajo aesthetics, traditions, politics, and people on their own terms.

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Beloved Houma/Choctaw storyteller Grayhawk Perkins shares age-old wisdom in an unforgettable collection of folktales.

Grayhawk’s Native American Folktales is the eagerly awaited collection of stories by Grayhawk Perkins, a noted Houma storyteller from Louisiana. Drawing on traditional Indigenous tales, Grayhawk transforms these narratives into stories that captivate contemporary readers and audiences.

The collection features universal animal characters such as Deer, Rabbit, Bobcat, Turtle, and Snake that embody a variety of traits. Their adventures and challenges in the natural world reveal human behavior and lessons about how to treat others. Creation stories explain how the world and its inhabitants came to be, including the diligent Crawfish, the origin of skunk stripes, and why opossums are white. Although written for children ages 7 to 12 and their families, all will be charmed by Grayhawk’s contributions to Indigenous literature.

During the four decades following the War of 1812, Great Lakes Indians were forced to surrender most of their ancestral homelands and begin refashioning their lives on reservations. The challenges Indians faced during this period could not have been greater. By century's end, settlers, frontier developers, and federal bureaucrats possessed not only economic and political power but also the bulk of the region's resources. It is little wonder that policymakers in Washington and Ottawa alike anticipated the disappearance of distinctive Indian communities within a single generation. However, these predictions have proved false as Great Lakes Indian communities, though assaulted on both sides of the international border to this day, have survived. Danziger's lively and insightful book documents the story of these Great Lakes Indians---a study not of victimization but of how Aboriginal communities and their leaders have determined their own destinies and preserved core values, lands, and identities against all odds and despite ongoing marginalization.

Utilizing eyewitness accounts from the 1800s and an innovative, cross-national approach, Danziger explores not only how Native Americans adapted to their new circumstances---including attempts at horse and plow agriculture, the impact of reservation allotment, and the response to Christian evangelists---but also the ways in which the astute and resourceful Great Lakes chiefs, councils, and clan mothers fought to protect their homeland and preserve the identity of their people. Through their efforts, dreams of economic self-sufficiency and self-determination as well as the historic right to unimpeded border crossings---from one end of the Great Lakes basin to the other---were kept alive.

Edmund Jefferson Danziger, Jr., is a Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of History at Bowling Green State University. Danziger is well known among historians and anthropologists for his interpretive histories of Great Lakes Native Americans.

Photo of girls at Lac du Flambeau School courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society, image 55938; photo of Ojibwa farm family at Garden River Reservation courtesy Archives of Ontario, image S 16361.