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8 books match the query 'Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island'

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Boundless

Native American Abundance in Art and Literature

Lisa A. Crossman and Heid E. Erdrich

Amherst College Press, 2025

Boundless expands conversations on Native and Indigenous art and literature by presenting words and images in kinship. Starting in the collections of the Mead Art Museum and the Collection of Native American Literature at Amherst College and centered on the creative production of Native peoples of the Northeast, the project follows relationships between Indigenous authors and artists across the United States and beyond borders. Boundless presents an engagement of Indigenous curatorial methods as practiced by guest curator Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe) in an exhibition in two iterations hosted by the Mead in 2023 and 2024. Advisors to Boundless include Mohegan, Nipmuc, Shinnecock, and Wampanoag artists and scholars, along with others, who supported Erdrich in her urge to center the project in the Northeast. Advisors contributed both visual art and writing to the exhibition and publication. Collaborative co-creation between artists, students, faculty, Mead staff Lisa Crossman and Emily Potter-Ndiaye and the guest curator are also explored in this illustrated volume.

Amherst College’s Collection of Native American Literature contains thousands of Indigenous-authored works spanning centuries. The Collection’s abundance of books, prints, music, ephemera, and artist-made works, all by Native people, provide rich selections for Boundless. Crosscurrents of Indigenous visual art and literature are considered in this broad and interdisciplinary project. Boundless crosses generations to explore relatedness, kinship, and collegiality.

Boundless brings artists and writers together across generations, often drawing together works by members of the same tribe or even the same family to show the history, presence, and futurity of Native American creative and intellectual production.

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Heart of the Stone / El corazón de la piedra / Uk'u'x ri ab'aj

By Rosa Chávez, translated by Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez and Wel Raxulew

Amherst College Press, 2027

In Heart of the Stone, Rosa Chávez celebrates a Maya spirituality that recognizes all things—stones included—as part of the web of life. At the center of the collection is tijax, the poet's nawal represented by obsidian, the volcanic stone. Her verses cut through grief and fear to address colonization, injustices, and environmental abuse, while carving out a space for tenderness and deep healing.

Originally written in Spanish and translated into Maya K'iche' by Wel Raxulew, this stunning trilingual edition brings the poems into English for the first time in Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez's translation. The volume is framed by an introduction from Ramirez-Chavez, photography by Carlos Bernardo Euler Coy, and illustrations by Erick Boror.

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New Perspectives on the Origins of Americanist Archaeology

Edited by David L. Browman and Stephen Williams

University of Alabama Press, 2002

In this landmark book, experienced scholars take a retrospective look at the developing routes that have brought American archaeologists into the 21st century.

In 1996, the Society for American Archaeology's Committee on the History of Archaeology established a biennial symposium
named after Gordon R. Willey, one of the fathers of American archaeology, to focus on the history of the discipline. This volume grew out of the
second symposium, presented at the 1998 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Interest in the intellectual history of the field is certainly nothing new—the first such volume appeared in 1856—but previously, focus has been on individuals and their theories and methods, or on various government agencies that supported, developed, or mandated
excavations in North America. This volume, however, focuses on the roots of Americanist archaeology, including its pre-1915 European connections, and on some of the earliest work by women archaeologists, which has been largely overlooked.

Full of valuable insights for archaeologists and anthropologists—both professional and amateur—into the history and
development of Americanist archaeology, New Perspectives will also inspire and serve as a model for future research.

David Browman is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Interdisciplinary Program in Archaeology at Washington University. Stephen Williams is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Harvard University.

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On the Back of a Turtle

A Narrative of the Huron-Wyandot People

Lloyd Divine Jr.

The Ohio State University Press, 2019

On the Back of a Turtle is an all-inclusive history of the Huron-Wyandot people—from before the creation of the Great Island, now called North America, to the present day. No other full-length history of the Huron-Wyandot people exists. Presented in a conversational, easy-to-read style, the book is a compelling and informative telling of the story of the Huron-Wyandot people as told by a tribal historian.

As characters and tribes emerge in the Huron-Wyandot’s oral tradition of creation, and take their respective places upon the Great Island, the author reveals the most difficult element of the Huron-Wyandot’s history: how the tribal name was obtained. With the knowledge of how both Huron and Wyandot are relevant names for one tribe of people, the author then shares his tribe’s amazing history. The reader will be fascinated to learn how one of the smallest tribes, birthed amid the Iroquois Wars, rose to become one of the most respected and influential tribes of North America.

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Permafrost Is an Archive

and Other Inheritances from the Alaska-Yukon Borderlands

Corinna Cook

West Virginia University Press, 2026

The Yukon Ice Patch Project reveals ancient lives. A road through the boreal forest reads like a map of climate upheaval. Those houses with broken doorknobs—a legacy of government regulation over Indigenous life. Corinna Cook, who was born white on Áak’w Kwáan Tlingit land in Juneau, Alaska, wrestles with the past and future into Canada’s Yukon Territory. With writing that blends research and reverie, her essays ask how we might come into right relations with our most difficult, shared histories. How can we carry the past together, in a good way, as the land melts? The answers—elusive as they are—carry global resonance, taking shape through a deeply personal lens combined with careful study of local arts, artifacts, maps, and the land we depend on.

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Self-Determined Stories

The Indigenous Reinvention of Young Adult Literature

Mandy Suhr-Sytsma

Michigan State University Press, 2018

The first book of its kind, Self-Determined Stories: The Indigenous Reinvention of Young Adult Literature reads Indigenous-authored YA—from school stories to speculative fiction— not only as a vital challenge to stereotypes but also as a rich intellectual resource for theorizing Indigenous sovereignty in the contemporary era. Building on scholarship from Indigenous studies, children’s literature, and cultural studies, Suhr-Sytsma delves deep in close readings of works by Sherman Alexie, Jeannette Armstrong, Joseph Bruchac, Drew Hayden Taylor, Susan Power, Cynthia Leitich Smith, and Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel. Together, Suhr-Sytsma contends, these works constitute a unique Indigenous YA genre. This genre radically revises typical YA conventions while offering a fresh portrayal of Indigenous self-determination and a fresh critique of multiculturalism, heteropatriarchy, and hybridity. This literature, moreover, imagines compelling alternative ways to navigate cultural dynamism, intersectionality, and alliance-formation. Self-Determined Stories invites readers from a range of contexts to engage with Indigenous YA and convincingly demonstrates the centrality of Indigenous stories, Indigenous knowledge, and Indigenous people to the flourishing of everyone in every place.

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The Great Tree and the Summer Sun

Survivance and Futurity in the Narragansett Country

Mack H. Scott III

University of Massachusetts Press, 2027

Documenting the long struggle of the Narragansett Nation to protect their land, sovereignty, and future

On a hot mid-July morning in 2003, members of the Narragansett Nation formed an impromptu human shield. They assembled to protect what they understood to be sacred and sovereign land. On the other side of the road stood dozens of local police officers and more than twenty state troopers, acting on direct orders from Rhode Island Governor Donald L. Carcieri to forcibly close a smoke shop the state claimed was operating illegally. It was a flashpoint in a long, drawn-out, and continuing struggle—one that historian Mack H. Scott III, himself a member of the Narragansett Nation, has spent his career documenting.

In The Great Tree and the Summer Sun, Scott tells the story of his people: the largest and most influential Indigenous community in the Dawnland, the coastal New England region his ancestors have called home for centuries. The Narragansett, whom the sachem Miantonomo described as “a great tree,” have endured nearly 400 years of mostly adversarial relations with their non-Indigenous neighbors—despite the mythology of Rhode Island’s benevolent founding and its supposed social egalitarianism.

Scott explores the long durée of local cross-cultural interactions that hardened hearts, minds, and viewpoints, not just in Rhode Island, but throughout Turtle Island (North America), as Natives and newcomers struggled to reconstitute and redefine themselves within a contested landscape. Commencing in the seventeenth century and concluding in the twenty-first, this episodic historical survey foregrounds the varied experiences of members of the Great Tree as they negotiated the realities of the Summer Sun—settler colonialism—to ensure that their futures remained irrepressible.

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