American Indian Studies

A native America -- New peoples and shatter zones -- Increasing colonial contacts -- Colonial alliances and the new nation -- The equestrian plains, 1600s-1851 -- California and tierra despoblada, 1760s-1840s -- Pacific northwest trade and treaties, 1770s-1860s -- Removal and reservations, 1820s-1860s -- American Indians and the Civil War -- Resisting outsiders -- Assimilation(s) and the reservation life, 1880-1900 -- Last men, wild west shows, and survival, 1890s-1924 -- The Indian New Deal and World War II, 1924-1945 -- Relocation, termination, and self-determination -- Red power, resistance, and self-determination, 1960-1980 -- Looking to the future.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: History Without Documents -- 1 First Americans -- 2 The Archaic Period, 7000-1000 BCE -- 3 Nuclear America -- 4 Classical Era -- 5 Early Woodland, 1000-100 BCE -- 6 Middle Woodland, 100 bce-400 CE -- 7 The West Coast -- 8 Late Woodland, to 1600 CE -- 9 Cahokia and the Mississippian Period, 950-1600 CE -- 10 The American Southwest -- 11 The Interior West -- 12 The North -- 13 Overview: North America, 1600 -- 14 Issues and Puzzles -- Sources by Chapter -- Bibliography -- Index.

By engaging a topic often avoided in political science and American Indian studies, Reservation Politics allows us to see complex historical processes at work in contemporary American Indian life. Orr's findings are essential to understanding why tribal governments make the choices they do.

This essential reference examines the history, culture, and modern tribal concerns of American Indians in North America. * Sidebars with additional information, resources, and primary source excerpts * Contributions from top scholars in the field * Bibliographies at the end of each essay for additional research

Responding to anti-Indianism in America, the wide-ranging perspectives culled in Unlearning the Language of Conquest present a provocative account of the contemporary hegemony still at work today, whether conscious or unconscious. Four Arrows has gathered a rich collection of voices and topics, including: Waziyatawin Angela Cavender Wilson's Burning Down the House: Laura Ingalls Wilder and American Colonialism, which probes the mentality of hatred woven within the pages of this iconographic children's literature; David N. Gibb's The Question of Whitewashing in American History and Social Science, featuring a candid discussion of the spurious relationship between sources of academic funding and the types of research allowed or discouraged; and Barbara Alice Mann's Where Are Your Women? Missing in Action, displaying the exclusion of Native American women in curricula that purport to illuminate the history of Indigenous Peoples.

In recent years, works by American Indian artists and filmmakers such as Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, Edgar Heap of Birds, Sherman Alexie, Shelley Niro, and Chris Eyre have illustrated the importance of visual culture as a means to mediate identity in contemporary Native America. This insightful collection of essays explores how identity is created and communicated through Native film-, video-, and art-making; what role these practices play in contemporary cultural revitalization; and how indigenous creators revisit media pasts and resignify dominant discourses through their work. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art draws on American Indian Studies, American Studies, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. Among the artists examined are Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, Eric Gansworth, Melanie Printup Hope, Jolene Rickard, and George Longfish. Films analyzed include Imprint, It Starts with a Whisper, Mohawk Girls, Skins, The Business of Fancydancing, and a selection of Native Latin films.

Ethnology and Empire tells stories about words and ideas, and ideas about words that developed in concert with shifting conceptions about Native peoples and western spaces in the nineteenth-century United States. Contextualizing the emergence of Native American linguistics as both a professionalized research discipline and as popular literary concern of American culture prior to the U.S.-Mexico War, Robert Lawrence Gunn reveals the manner in which relays between the developing research practices of ethnology, works of fiction, autobiography, travel narratives, Native oratory, and sign languages gave imaginative shape to imperial activity in the western borderlands. In literary and performative settings that range from the U.S./Mexico borderlands to the Great Lakes region of Tecumseh's Pan-Indian Confederacy and the hallowed halls of learned societies in New York and Philadelphia, Ethnology and Empire models an interdisciplinary approach to networks of peoples, spaces, and communication practices that transformed the boundaries of U.S. empire through a transnational and scientific archive. Emphasizing the culturally transformative impacts western expansionism and Indian Removal, Ethnology and Empire reimagines U.S. literary and cultural production for future conceptions of hemispheric American literatures.

"Sovereignty" is perhaps the most ubiquitous term in American Indian writing today--but its meaning and function are anything but universally understood. This is as it should be, David J. Carlson suggests, for a concept frequently at the center of various--and often competing--claims to authority. In Imagining Sovereignty, Carlson explores sovereignty as a discursive middle ground between tribal communities and the United States as a settler-colonial power. His work reveals the complementary ways in which legal and literary texts have generated politically significant representations of the world, which in turn have produced particular effects on readers and advanced the cause of tribal self-determination. Drawing on western legal historical sources and American Indian texts, Carlson traces a dual genealogy of sovereignty. Imagining Sovereignty identifies the concept as a marker, one that allows both the colonizing power of the United States and the resisting powers of various American Indian nations to organize themselves and their various claims to authority. In the process, sovereignty also functions as a point of exchange where these claims compete with and complicate one another. To this end, Carlson analyzes how several contemporary American Indian writers and critics have sought to fuse literary practices and legal structures into fully formed discourses of self-determination. After charting the development of the concept of sovereignty in natural law and its permutations in federal Indian policy, Carlson maps out the nature and function of sovereignty discourses in the work of contemporary Native scholars such as Russel Barsh, Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, D'Arcy McNickle, and Vine Deloria, and in the work of more expressly literary American Indian writers such as Craig Womack, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Gerald Vizenor, and Francisco Patencio. Often read in opposition, the writings of these indigenous authors emerge in Imagining Sovereignty as a coherent literary and political tradition--one whose varied discourse of sovereignty aptly reflects American Indian people's diverse political contexts.

Contemporary discourses on "Indianness": introduction / Deborah L. Madsen -- Questions about the question of "authenticity": notes on Moolelo Hawaii and the struggle for Pono / Paul Lyons -- Cycles of selfhood, cycles of nationhood: authenticity, identity, community, sovereignty / David L. Moore -- "Back when I used to be Indian": Native American authenticity and postcolonial discourse / Lee Schweninger -- The x-blood files: whose story? whose Indian? / Malea Powell -- Modernism, authenticity and Indian identity: Frank "Toronto" Prewett (1893-1962) / Joy Porter -- Transdifference in the work of Gerald Vizenor / Helmbrecht Breinig -- Traces of others in our own other, monocultural ideals, multicultural resistance / Juan Bruce-Novoa -- Sacred community, sacred culture: authenticity and modernity in Canadian First Nations writing / Richard J. Lane -- In conversation: postindian reflections: chickens and piranha, casinos, and sovereignty / Gerald Vizenor and A. Robert Lee.

Critically Sovereign traces the ways in which gender is inextricably a part of Indigenous politics and U.S. and Canadian imperialism and colonialism. The contributors show how gender, sexuality, and feminism work as co-productive forces of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and epistemology. Several essays use a range of literary and legal texts to analyze the production of colonial space, the biopolitics of "Indianness," and the collisions and collusions between queer theory and colonialism within Indigenous studies. Others address the U.S. government's criminalization of traditional forms of Din#65533; marriage and sexuality, the I#65533;upiat people's changing conceptions of masculinity as they embrace the processes of globalization, Hawai'i's same-sex marriage bill, and stories of Indigenous women falling in love with non-human beings such as animals, plants, and stars. Following the politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism across these diverse historical and cultural contexts, the contributors question and reframe the thinking about Indigenous knowledge, nationhood, citizenship, history, identity, belonging, and the possibilities for a decolonial future. Contributors. Jodi A. Byrd, Joanne Barker, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Mishuana Goeman,  J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Melissa K. Nelson, Jessica Bissett Perea, Mark Rifkin

One hundred and forty years before Gerda Lerner established women's history as a specialized field in 1972, a small group of women began to claim American Indian history as their own domain. A Field of Their Own examines nine key figures in American Indian scholarship to reveal how women came to be identified with Indian history and why they eventually claimed it as their own field. From Helen Hunt Jackson to Angie Debo, the magnitude of their research, the reach of their scholarship, the popularity of their publications, and their close identification with Indian scholarship makes their invisibility as pioneering founders of this specialized field all the more intriguing. Reclaiming this lost history, John M. Rhea looks at the cultural processes through which women were connected to Indian history and traces the genesis of their interest to the nineteenth-century push for women's rights. In the early 1830s evangelical preachers and women's rights proponents linked American Indians to white women's religious and social interests. Later, pre-professional women ethnologists would claim Indians as a special political cause. Helen Hunt Jackson's 1881 publication, A Century of Dishonor, and Alice Fletcher's 1887 report, Indian Education and Civilization, foreshadowed the emerging history profession's objective methodology and established a document-driven standard for later Indian histories. By the twentieth century, historians Emma Helen Blair, Louise Phelps Kellogg, and Annie Heloise Abel, in a bid to boost their professional status, established Indian history as a formal specialized field. However, enduring barriers continued to discourage American Indians from pursuing their own document-driven histories. Cultural and academic walls crumbled in 1919 when Cherokee scholar Rachel Caroline Eaton earned a Ph.D. in American history. Eaton and later Indigenous historians Anna L. Lewis and Muriel H. Wright would each play a crucial role in shaping Angie Debo's 1940 indictment of European American settler colonialism, And Still the Waters Run. Rhea's wide-ranging approach goes beyond existing compensatory histories to illuminate the national consequences of women's century-long predominance over American Indian scholarship. In the process, his thoughtful study also chronicles Indigenous women's long and ultimately successful struggle to transform the way that historians portray American Indian peoples and their pasts.

We are all caught up in one another, Scott Lauria Morgensen asserts, we who live in settler societies, and our interrelationships inform all that these societies touch. Native people live in relation to all non-Natives amid the ongoing power relations of settler colonialism, despite never losing inherent claims to sovereignty as indigenous peoples. Explaining how relational distinctions of “Native” and “settler” define the status of being “queer,” Spaces between Us argues that modern queer subjects emerged among Natives and non-Natives by engaging the meaningful difference indigeneity makes within a settler society.

Morgensen’s analysis exposes white settler colonialism as a primary condition for the development of modern queer politics in the United States. Bringing together historical and ethnographic cases, he shows how U.S. queer projects became non-Native and normatively white by comparatively examining the historical activism and critical theory of Native queer and Two-Spirit people.

Presenting a “biopolitics of settler colonialism”—in which the imagined disappearance of indigeneity and sustained subjugation of all racialized peoples ensures a progressive future for white settlers—Spaces between Us newly demonstrates the interdependence of nation, race, gender, and sexuality and offers opportunities for resistance in the United States.