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Do you want to age independently in your own home and neighborhood? Staying home, aging in place, is most people's preference, but most American housing and communities are not adapted to the needs of older people. And with the fastest population growth among people over 65, finding solutions for successful aging is important not only for individual families, but for our whole society. In Independent for Life, former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros and a team of experts on aging, architecture, construction, health, finance, and politics assess the current state of housing and present new possibilities that realistically address the interrelated issues of housing, communities, services, and financial concerns.

Independent for Life covers a wide range of smart solutions, including remodeling current housing and building new homes for accessibility and safety, retrofitting existing neighborhoods to connect needed services and amenities, and planning new communities that work well for people of all ages. Case studies show how the proposals can be implemented. The authors offer action plans for working with policy makers at local, state, and national levels to address the larger issues of aging in place, including family financial security, real estate markets, and the limitations of public support. Lists of essential resources, including a detailed "to do" list of aging in place priorities and an individual home assessment, complete the volume.

According to an early 1990s study, 95 percent of what college students know about Native Americans was acquired through the media, leading to widespread misunderstandings of First Nations peoples. Sierra Adare contends that negative "Indian" stereotypes do physical, mental, emotional, and financial harm to First Nations individuals.

At its core, this book is a social study whose purpose is to explore the responses of First Nations peoples to representative "Indian" stereotypes portrayed within the TV science fiction genre. Participants in Adare's study viewed episodes from My Favorite Martian, Star Trek, Star Trek: Voyager, Quantum Leap, The Adventures of Superman, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Reactions by viewers range from optimism to a deep-rooted sadness. The strongest responses came after viewing a Superman episode's depiction of an "evil medicine man" who uses a ceremonial pipe to kill a warrior. The significance of First Nations peoples' responses and reactions are both surprising and profound. After publication of "Indian" Stereotypes in TV Science Fiction, ignorance can no longer be used as an excuse for Hollywood's irresponsible depiction of First Nations peoples' culture, traditions, elders, religious beliefs, and sacred objects.

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.

Indians of the Rio Grande Delta is the first single-volume source on these little-known peoples. Working from innumerable primary documents in various Texan and Mexican archives, Martin Salinas has compiled data on more than six dozen named groups that inhabited the area in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Depending on available information, he reconstructs something of their history, geographical range and migrations, demography, language, and culture. He also offers general information on various unnamed groups of Indians, on the lifeways of the indigenous peoples, and on the relations between the Indian groups and the colonial Spanish missions in the region.

Indian trader, rancher, harbor developer, oil impresario—these are the many worlds of one of the least chronicled but most fascinating characters of the American West. In the early, bustling years of the frontier, a brazen young man named William McDole Lee moved from Wisconsin to Kansas and then to Texas to forge a life for himself. Becoming a driving entrepreneurial force in Texas's development, Lee soon garnered the alliances and resources necessary to shape the financial destinies of disparate groups throughout the state. His story is expertly told in Donald F. Schofield's Indians, Cattle, Ships, and Oil.

Beginning in 1869 as a trader to the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes and fort provisioner to troops garrisoned at Camp Supply, Indian Territory, Lee gained a partner and amassed a fortune in short order from trading buffalo hides and robes. Vast herds of buffalo grazing on the southern plains were killed largely on his order. When buffalo were no longer a profitable commodity, Lee tackled his next challenge—the cattle trade.

He began with herds branded LR that grazed on pastures near Fort Supply. Then came his LE herd in the Texas Panhandle. Another partnership, with noted cattle rancher Lucien Scott, resulted in the vast LS ranch, one of the most successful operations of its day. Lee even introduced a new breed of cattle, the Aberdeen-Angus, to the western range. But as his partnership faded, Lee moved on to his next undertaking—the development of Texas' first deep-water harbor.

In 1888, Lee and other financiers put up one million dollars to finance a dream: opening international trade from the waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the mainland at the mouth of the Brazos River. Their Brazos River Channel and Dock Company was to construct, own, and operate a deep-water harbor at Velasco, with a railroad link to Houston. Though threats of financial disaster loomed large, the Velasco facility was to welcome, in its day, tugs, barges, and three-masted schooners and to provide impetus for Houston's boom. Yet with success, the mercurial Lee turned to yet another challenge—oil.

Starting still another partnership, Lee committed himself to prospecting for oil on the West Columbia Ridge in Brazoria County. Lee and crew struck oil in 1907, developing one of the first producing wells of Brazoria County, but inadequate drilling equipment hampered further fruitful exploration. Lee moved his rigs to the famed Spindletop, where he perfected the technique of shallow drilling. Though spectacular success in the oil business eluded him, Lee's accomplishments set him squarely among the great entrepreneurs of the Texas oil industry.

Lee's exploits led him to roles in some of the most dramatic moments in Texas and the West—Indian uprisings, buffalo hunts, political scandals, cowboy strikes and shoot-outs, railroad promotions, oil-well blow-outs and gushers. The people he encountered are the famous and infamous of western history: Cheyenne Chief Little Robe and the outlaw "Hurricane Bill" Martin; Indian Agent John D. Miles and Major General John Pope; outlaws Tom Harris and William Bonney, and Sheriff Pat Garrett. Altogether, Lee's biography vividly shows one man's manipulation of people and events during the settlement of the American frontier.

During the 1990s, films such as sex, lies, and videotape, The Crying Game, Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, and Shakespeare in Love earned substantial sums at the box office along with extensive critical acclaim. A disproportionate number of these hits came from one company: Miramax. Indie, Inc. surveys Miramax’s evolution from independent producer-distributor to studio subsidiary, chronicling how one company transformed not just the independent film world but the film and media industries more broadly. As Alisa Perren illustrates, Miramax’s activities had an impact on everything from film festival practices to marketing strategies, talent development to awards campaigning.

Case studies of key films, including The Piano, Kids, Scream, The English Patient, and Life Is Beautiful, reveal how Miramax went beyond influencing Hollywood business practices and motion picture aesthetics to shaping popular and critical discourses about cinema during the 1990s. Indie, Inc. does what other books about contemporary low-budget cinema have not—it transcends discussions of “American indies” to look at the range of Miramax-released genre films, foreign-language films, and English-language imports released over the course of the decade. The book illustrates that what both the press and scholars have typically represented as the “rise of the American independent” was in fact part of a larger reconfiguration of the media industries toward niche-oriented products.

This new volume offers a broad overview of topics pertaining to gender-related health, violence, and healing. Employing a strength-based approach (as opposed to a deficit model), the chapters address the resiliency of Indigenous women and two-spirit people in the face of colonial violence and structural racism.

The book centers the concept of “rematriation”—the concerted effort to place power, peace, and decision making back into the female space, land, body, and sovereignty—as a decolonial practice to combat injustice. Chapters include such topics as reproductive health, diabetes, missing and murdered Indigenous women, Indigenous women in the academy, and Indigenous women and food sovereignty.

As part of the Indigenous Justice series, this book provides an overview of the topic, geared toward undergraduate and graduate classes.

Contributors
Alisse Ali-Joseph
Michèle Companion
Mary Jo Tippeconnic Fox
Brooke de Heer
Lomayumtewa K. Ishii
Karen Jarratt-Snider
Lynn C. Jones
Anne Luna-Gordinier
Kelly McCue
Marianne O. Nielsen
Linda M. Robyn
Melinda S. Smith
Jamie Wilson

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.