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In the 1850s, early Euro-American settlers established two remote outposts on the slopes of the eastern Sierra Nevada, both important way stations on the central emigrant trail. The Carson Valley settlement was located on the western edge of the Utah Territory, while the Honey Lake Valley hamlet, 120 miles north, fell within California’s boundaries but was separated from the rest of the state by the formidable mountain range. Although these were some of the first white communities established in the region, both areas had long been inhabited by Indigenous Americans. Carson Valley had been part of Washoe Indian territory, and Honey Lake Valley was a section of Northern Paiute land.

Michael Makley explores the complexities of this turbulent era, when the pioneers’ actions set the stage for both valleys to become part of national incorporation. With deft writing and meticulously researched portrayals of the individuals involved, including the Washoe and Northern Paiute peoples, Imposing Order Without Law focuses on the haphazard evolution of “frontier justice” in these remote outposts. White settlers often brought with them their own ideas of civil order. Makley’s work contextualizes the extralegal acts undertaken by the settlers to enforce edicts in their attempt to establish American communities.

Makley’s book reveals the use and impact of group violence, both within the settlements and within the Indigenous peoples’ world, where it transformed their lives.

This volume highlights the work of the late Gordon M. Day, renowned for his groundbreaking research on the history and culture of the Western Abenakis and their Indian neighbors. Where previous historians had tended to portray northern New England as an area largely devoid of aboriginal peoples, Day established beyond all doubt the presence of Abenaki settlements along the eastern shore of Lake Champlain as well as the upper reaches of the Connecticut and Merrimack rivers. 

For nearly three decades, Day focused his work on the community of Saint Francis, or Odanak, in Quebec, to which Abenaki refugees from interior New England had fled, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century and continuing into the nineteenth. Drawing on the methods of several disciplines, including ethnology, linguistics, and ethnohistory, he synthesized data from fragmentary historical records, oral traditions, and place names to reconstruct a world assumed to be lost.

An exploration of how Indigenous and Black communities shaped religious imagery and navigated life in colonial Lima.

Colonial Lima was steeped in Christian devotional imagery. While Spaniards set the norms for these works, it was the city’s Black and Indigenous majority that engaged with them most. As members of lay societies of worshippers called confraternities, subalterns were Lima’s key promoters of religious art, surpassing the colonial hierarchy.

Ximena Gómez argues that, by commissioning and exhibiting sacred images—in chapels and urban processions, adorned with clothing and accessories—Indigenous and Black confraternities created Lima’s visual culture. In one case study, the Indigenous confraternity of the Virgin of Copacabana "invisibly" transforms a sculpture into an object that reflected its multiethnic Andean caretakers. Another case study, that of the confraternity of the Virgin of the Antigua, finds Black worshippers initially united in their interpretation of a Spanish image and later fracturing when some of its members applied a West African interpretive lens. Taking advantage of Lima’s rich documentary record, In the Hands of Devotees centers the ritual practices of Black and Indigenous people and opens possibilities for incorporating subalterns into the history of Lima’s art when limited extant visual evidence has survived.

At the time of the conquest of Mexico, the anonymous authors of the Anales de Tlatelolco (1560s) recorded the deaths of two Mexica ritual specialists. During the tumultuous events of the times, Quauhnochtli (a telpochcalli specialist) and Quauhcoatl (a calmecac specialist) died protecting the temple of Huitzilopochtli and his bundled embodiement in the neighborhood of Huitznahuac. 

Scholar Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry reconstructs the lives and labors of the two specialists, articulated through Nahuatl-language texts, material culture from neighborhood and temple spaces, and the academic study of religion. The book expands on known theories on Mexica ritual specialists by providing new insights about telpochcalli and calmecac duties, their interrelated educational models, and the collective practices that brought people, animals, flora, specialists, and teteo (more-than-human forces) together. The book demonstrates that telpochcalli and calmecac specialists shared the ritual responsibilities of collective and elective practices.

Giving care to teteo, giving life, and giving offerings were balanced with giving war, giving council, and giving music and dance. As Quauhnochtli and Quauhcoatl ensured the safety of the bundled Huitzilopochtli, they characterized how a Mexica ritual specialist lived and what they did.

A center of the lucrative fur trade throughout the colonial period, the Great Lakes region was an important site of cultural as well as economic exchange between native and European peoples. In this well-researched study, Susan Sleeper-Smith focuses on an often overlooked aspect of these interactions—the role played by Indian women who married French traders. Drawing on a broad range of primary and secondary sources, she shows how these women used a variety of means to negotiate a middle ground between two disparate cultures. Many were converts to Catholicism who constructed elaborate mixed-blood kinship networks that paralleled those of native society, thus facilitating the integration of Indian and French values. By the mid-eighteenth century, native women had extended these kin linkages to fur trade communities throughout the Great Lakes, not only enhancing access to the region's highly prized pelts but also ensuring safe transport for other goods. 

Indian Women and French Men depicts the encounter of Old World and New as an extended process of indigenous adaptation and change rather than one of conflict and inevitable demise. By serving as brokers between those two worlds, Indian women who married French men helped connect the Great Lakes to a larger, expanding transatlantic economy while securing the survival of their own native culture. As such, Sleeper-Smith points out, their experiences illuminate those of other traditional cultures forced to adapt to market-motivated Europeans.

Explores how American Indian artists have responded to the pervasive misunderstanding of indigenous peoples as cultural minorities in the United States and Canada

Contemporary indigenous peoples in North America confront a unique predicament. While they are reclaiming their historic status as sovereign nations, mainstream popular culture continues to depict them as cultural minorities similar to other ethnic Americans. These depictions of indigenous peoples as “Native Americans” complete the broader narrative of America as a refuge to the world’s immigrants and a home to contemporary multicultural democracies, such as the United States and Canada. But they fundamentally misrepresent indigenous peoples, whose American history has been not of immigration but of colonization.

Monika Siebert’s Indians Playing Indian first identifies this phenomenon as multicultural misrecognition, explains its sources in North American colonial history and in the political mandates of multiculturalism, and describes its consequences for contemporary indigenous cultural production. It then explores the responses of indigenous artists who take advantage of the ongoing popular interest in Native American culture and art while offering narratives of the political histories of their nations in order to resist multicultural incorporation.

Each chapter of Indians Playing Indian showcases a different medium of contemporary indigenous art—museum exhibition, cinema, digital fine art, sculpture, multimedia installation, and literary fiction—and explores specific rhetorical strategies artists deploy to forestall multicultural misrecognition and recover political meanings of indigeneity. The sites and artists discussed include the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC; filmmakers at Inuit Isuma Productions; digital artists/photographers Dugan Aguilar, Pamela Shields, and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie; sculptor Jimmie Durham; and novelist LeAnne Howe.

Winner of a NWSA/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize

Groundbreaking and ambitious, Indians on Indian Lands presents the case for holding Indian diasporas accountable for acts of violence within a colonial settler nation.

In The Limits of Latin American Philosophy: Indigeneity and the Mestizo Question, Jorge Sanchez-Perez argues that the distinction between Latin American philosophy and Indigenous philosophy from Latin America has been neglected. While Latin American philosophers have succeeded in carving out a conceptual space in the landscape of Western philosophy, a space in which issues positions relevant to Latin American concerns are discussed and debated, this space has failed to sufficiently acknowledge the differences with Indigenous philosophy from Latin America. Although both fields can point to some, even if contested, geographical shared space, they emerge from different conceptual backgrounds. While Latin American philosophy emerges as a project in relation, even if as a rejection, to Europe, Indigenous philosophy from Latin America predates the existence of Europe by thousands of years. By defining the countours of Latin American philosophy, The Limits of Latin American Philosophy aims to make room for discussions of Indigenous philosophy from Latin America.

Who has the right to represent Native history?
 

The past several decades have seen a massive shift in debates over who owns and has the right to tell Native American history and stories. For centuries, non-Native actors have collected, stolen, sequestered, and gained value from Native stories and documents, human remains, and sacred objects. However, thanks to the work of Native activists, Native history is now increasingly being repatriated back to the control of tribes and communities. Indigenous Archival Activism takes readers into the heart of these debates by tracing one tribe’s fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite their history.

Rose Miron tells the story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and their Historical Committee, a group of mostly Mohican women who have been collecting and reorganizing historical materials since 1968. She shows how their work is exemplary of how tribal archives can be used strategically to shift how Native history is accessed, represented, written and, most importantly, controlled. Based on a more than decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, Miron’s research and writing is shaped primarily by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations and input from the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee.

As a non-Mohican, Miron is careful to consider her own positionality and reflects on what it means for non-Native researchers and institutions to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations in the context of academia and public history, offering a model both for tribes undertaking their own reclamation projects and for scholars looking to work with tribes in ethical ways.

With more than fifty contributors, Indigenous Critical Reflections on Traditional Ecological Knowledge offers important perspectives by Indigenous Peoples on Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous value systems. The book aims to educate and inspire readers about the importance of decolonizing how Indigenous Knowledges are considered and used outside of Native communities.

By including the work of Indigenous storytellers, poets, and scholars from around the globe, editor Lara Jacobs and chapter authors effectively explore the Indigenous value systems—relationships, reciprocity, and responsibility—that are fundamental to Indigenous Knowledge systems and cultures. Indigenous languages and positionality statements are featured for each of the contributors to frame their cultural and geographical background and to allow each Indigenous voice to lead discussions and contribute critical discourse to the literature on Indigenous Knowledges and value systems. By creating space for each of these individual voices, this volume challenges colonial extraction norms and highlights the importance of decolonial methods in understanding and protecting Indigenous Knowledges.

Indigenous Critical Reflections on Traditional Ecological Knowledge is an essential resource for students, academics, members of Tribal, state, and federal governments, Indigenous communities, and non-Indigenous allies as well as a valuable addition to environmental and Indigenous studies collections.

Contributors include: Melinda M. Adams, Joe Anderson, Coral Avery, Andrew Kalani Carlson, Kathryn Champagne, Brandie Makeba Cross, Joanna M. DeMeyer, Jonathan James Fisk, Pat Gonzales-Rogers, Celina Gray, Rhode Grayson, Zena Greenawald, Jennifer Grenz, Joy Harjo, Mandi Harris, Jessica Hernandez, Victor Hernandez, David Iniguez, Michelle M. Jacob, Lara A. Jacobs, Lydia L. Jennings, Eileen Jimenez, Stephanie Kelley, David G. Lewis, Tomás A. Madrigal, Tara McAllister, Lauren Wendelle Yowelunh McLester-Davis, Angeles Mendoza, Kat Milligan-McClellan, Todd A. Mitchell swəlítub, Don Motanic, ‘Alohi Nakachi, Kaikea Nakachi, Kobe , Natachu, Ululani Kekahiliokalani Brigitte Russo Oana, Jennifer R. O’Neal, Lily Painter, Britt Postoak, Leasi Vanessa Lee Raymond, Anamaq Margaret H. C. Rudolf, Oral Saulters, Sam Schimmel, Paulette Steeves, Joni Tobacco, Angelo Villagomez, Vivi Vold, Margaret Palaghicon Von Rotz, Luhui Whitebear, Joseph Gazing Wolf, Monique Wynecoop, and Cherry YEW Yamane.

New England history often treats Indigenous people as minor or secondary actors within the larger colonial story. Focusing on those Native Americans who were sachems, or leaders, in local tribes when Europeans began arriving, Marie Balsley Taylor reframes stories of Indigenous and British interactions and illuminates the vital role that Indigenous kinship and diplomacy played in shaping the textual production of English colonial settlers in New England from the 1630s until King Philip’s War.

Taylor argues that genres like the conversion narrative, the post-sermon question and answer session, and scientific treatise—despite being written in English for European audiences—were jointly created by Indigenous sachems and settlers to facilitate interaction within the contested space of colonial New England. Analyzing the writings of Thomas Shepard, John Eliot, John Winthrop Jr., and Daniel Gookin and the relationships these English Protestants formed with Indigenous leaders like Wequash, Cutshamekin, Cassacinamon, and Waban, this innovative study offers a new approach to early American literature—indicating that Native thought and culture played a profound role in shaping the words and deeds of colonial writers.

Advancing Indigenous and allied voices to address urgent environmental questions at the crossroads of Indigenous and settler state sovereignty

Authored by a group of majority Indigenous scholars from across Canada and the United States, this collection enacts a radical intervention into colonial impulses in traditional political ecology scholarship and its examination of state power in environmental conflicts. Centering the human–nature relationality of Indigenous cosmologies, this book confronts the terms by which land and water degradation, climate change, and other disastrous effects of extractive capitalism are understood.

Drawing on family histories, storytelling, autoethnography, and community-grounded research, Indigenous Political Ecology showcases a deeply self-reflexive examination of intergenerational struggles over land rights and attempts to resist settler colonial dynamics, including struggles over knowledge itself. Contributors recount the fraught history of Bears Ears National Monument, decades of Seminole-led efforts to restore the Everglades ecosystem, the creation of land education programs advancing Cherokee sovereignty, the impact of mining development on Mushkegowuk homelands in the Ring of Fire, and many other ongoing stories in which the “ecological” and “political” are being redefined.

Through its collectively led efforts and transdisciplinary approach, Indigenous Political Ecology models a new type of environmental scholarship that considers its modes of production integral to its contributors’ broader ethical and political commitments. Rooted in Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, this groundbreaking volume sets forth a powerful blueprint for a more just and sustainable path through the field of political ecology.

Contributors: Nicholas A. Brown, Jessica R. Catellino, Andrew Curley, Michelle Daigle, Jean Dennison, Ashley Nichole Lewis, Beth Rose Middleton Manning, Teresa Montoya, Dana E. Powell, Kyle Powys Whyte, Jen Rose Smith, Lisa Wilson.

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Winner 2025 Bryce Wood Book Award

This is a book about how Nahuas—native speakers of Nahuatl, the common language of the Aztec Empire and of more than 2.5 million Indigenous people today—have explored, understood, and explained the world around them in pre-invasion, colonial, and contemporary time periods. It is a deep dive into Nahua theoretical and practical inquiry related to the environment, as well as the dynamic networks in which Nahuas create, build upon, and share knowledges, practices, tools, and objects to meet social, political, and economic needs.

In this work, author Kelly S. McDonough addresses Nahua understanding of plants and animals, medicine and ways of healing, water and water control, alphabetic writing, and cartography. Interludes between the chapters offer short biographical sketches and interviews with contemporary Nahua scientists, artists, historians, and writers, accompanied by their photos. The book also includes more than twenty full-color images from sources including the Florentine Codex, a sixteenth-century collaboration between Indigenous and Spanish scholars considered the most comprehensive extant source on the pre-Hispanic and early colonial Aztec (Mexica) world.

In Mexico today, the terms “Indigenous” and “science and technology” are rarely paired together. When they are, the latter tend to be framed as unrecoverable or irreparably damaged pre-Hispanic traditions⁠, relics confined to a static past. In Indigenous Science and Technology, McDonough works against such erroneous and racialized discourses with a focus on Nahua environmental engagements and relationalities, systems of communication, and cultural preservation and revitalization. Attention to these overlooked or obscured knowledges provides a better understanding of Nahua culture, past and present, as well as the entangled local and global histories in which they were—and are—vital actors.
 

Reframing the study of Indigenous visual cultures, this volume explores how images and objects generate affect and relation in non-Western contexts, foregrounding alternative modes of material engagement and meaning-making.

While traditional approaches to Indigenous visual cultures have often centered on iconography and representation, this volume turns toward other ways that images and objects act in the world. Indigenous Visual Cultures in Latin America explores how material productions function not merely as signs that point elsewhere but as agents that help shape relationships, environments, and affective experience.

Spanning Mesoamerica, the Andes, and Amazonia from 1500 BCE to the present, the chapters examine how meaning may reside in materials themselves; how making is a form of exchange between maker and matter; and how visual forms participate in configuring relations among humans, ancestors, deities, and place. These works are not passive containers of meaning, but charged presences—generative forces within ongoing worlds. Attuned to Indigenous ways of knowing and being, the volume invites readers to think beyond the frame, beyond the image, and beyond representation itself.

Igniting connection with the forests of the Great Lakes region through Indigenous teachings

When an invitation arrives from the forest, what will you hear? What will you learn? How will you respond? Ishkode: A Story of Fire brings readers into a beautiful stand of ancient red pines where Aanikoobijigan, a grandmother red pine, guides a young woman, Animikiimiikanikwe, toward healing and renewal through fire. Embracing the power of memory, storytelling, and restoration, this lyrical narrative is a celebration of hope, healing, and the lessons we can learn from the land.

Including an Ojibwe pronunciation guide and glossary, this book weaves Anishinaabe teachings with the science of tree rings to reveal the deep, enduring relationships between people, fire, pines, and the wider web of ecosystems in the Great Lakes region. Ishkode highlights the role of fire in the environment, bringing to light the connections between ecological restoration, cultural revival, and reciprocal stewardship.