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Welcome to the American Indian Studies Subject Guide!
This research guide is for the support and study of American Indian Studies at University of Utah. It is organized into tabs or pages that highlight different categories of library materials. Click on each tab to identify information and link to useful sources. For questions about this guide, contact American Indian Studies Librarian Lux Darkbloom.
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Below is a small selection of texts related to Indigenous Studies.
Against Extraction by Matt Hooley
ISBN: 1478030364Publication Date: 2024-04-26In Against Extraction Matt Hooley traces a modern tradition of Ojibwe invention in Minneapolis and St. Paul from the mid-nineteenth century to the present as that tradition emerges in response to the cultural legacies of US colonialism. Hooley shows how Indigenous literary and visual art modernisms challenge the strictures of everyday life and question the ecological, political, and cultural fantasies that make multivalent US colonialism seem inevitable. Hooley analyzes literature and art by Louise Erdrich, William Whipple Warren, David Treuer, George Morrison, and Gerald Vizenor in relation to histories of Indigenous dispossession and occupation, enslavement and Black life, and environmental harm and care. He shows that historical narratives of these cities are intimately bound up with the violence of colonial systems of extraction and that concepts like Indigeneity and sovereignty extend beyond treaty-granted promises of political control. These works, created in opposition and proximity to the extraction of cultural, political, and territorial resources, demonstrate how Indigenous claims to life and land matter to rethinking and unmaking the social and ecological devastations of the colonial world.Aggression and Sufferings : Settler Violence, Native Resistance, and the Coalescence of the Old South by F. Evan Nooe; Andrew K. Frank (Foreword by); Angela Pulley Hudson (Foreword by); Kristofer Ray (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9780817321741Publication Date: 2023-12-06A bold reconceptualization of how settler expansion and narratives of victimhood, honor, and revenge drove the conquest and erasure of the Native South and fed the emergence of a distinct white southern identity In 1823, Tennessee historian John Haywood encapsulated a foundational sentiment among the white citizenry of Tennessee when he wrote of a "long continued course of aggression and sufferings" between whites and Native Americans. According to F. Evan Nooe, "aggression" and "sufferings" are broad categories that can be used to represent the framework of factors contributing to the coalescence of the white South. Traditionally, the concept of coalescence is an anthropological model used to examine the transformation of Indigenous communities in the Eastern Woodlands from chieftaincies to Native tribes, confederacies, and nations in response to colonialism. Applying this concept to white southerners, Nooe argues that through the experiences and selective memory of settlers in the antebellum South, white southerners incorporated their aggression against and suffering at the hands of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeast in the coalescence of a regional identity built upon the violent dispossession of the Native South. This, in turn, formed a precursor to Confederate identity and its later iterations in the long nineteenth century. Geographically, Aggression and Sufferings prioritizes events in South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Nooe considers how divergent systems of violence and justice between Native Americans and white settlers (such as blood revenge and concepts of honor) functioned in the region and examines the involved societies' conflicting standards on how to equitably resolve interpersonal violence. Finally, Nooe explores how white southerners constructed, propagated, and perpetuated harrowing tales of colonizers as both victims and heroes in the violent expulsion of the region's Native peoples from their homelands. This constructed sense of regional history and identity continued to flower into the antebellum period, during western expansion, and well through the twentieth century.An American Genocide by Benjamin Madley
ISBN: 9780300181364Publication Date: 2016-05-24Between 1846 and 1873, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide.
Madley describes pre-contact California and precursors to the genocide before explaining how the Gold Rush stirred vigilante violence against California Indians. He narrates the rise of a state-sanctioned killing machine and the broad societal, judicial, and political support for genocide. Many participated: vigilantes, volunteer state militiamen, U.S. Army soldiers, U.S. congressmen, California governors, and others. The state and federal governments spent at least $1,700,000 on campaigns against California Indians. Besides evaluating government officials’ culpability, Madley considers why the slaughter constituted genocide and how other possible genocides within and beyond the Americas might be investigated using the methods presented in this groundbreaking book.American Indian Women of Proud Nations by Andrew Jolivette (Series edited by); Ulrike Wiethaus (Editor); Cherry Maynor Beasley (Editor); Mary Ann Jacobs (Editor)
ISBN: 9781433196195Publication Date: 2024-02-21At its onset, the American Indian Women of Proud Nations Organization set out to create a space that would uplift Native American women, children, and families because of their central roles in the continuation of Native communities. The contributors to the second edition continue to document and reflect on the organization's initiative and the efforts of Southeastern Native women and their allies to center women, children and families in protecting and strengthening kinship, land, and language as enduring aspects of Native American cultures. The second edition offers updated research on language revitalization, adolescents and their parental caregivers, Indigenous issues in higher education, and new work on matrilineality, the Missing and Murdered People crisis, and the continuation of healing traditions in a contemporary context.Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec; Nick Estes (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9781506478258Publication Date: 2022-09-27We find our way forward by going back. The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home." Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history. This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught.Being Indian and walking proud : American Indian identity and reality by Fixico, Donald Lee
ISBN: 9781003478317Publication Date: 2025"This book explores the identity of American Indians from an Indigenous perspective and how outside influences throughout history, from the arrival of Columbus in 1492 to the twenty-first century, have affected Native people. Being Indian and Walking Proud is a compelling resource for any reader interested in Indigenous history, including students and scholars in Native American and Indigenous studies, anthropology, and American history."Beyond Settler Time by Mark Rifkin
ISBN: 9780822362975Publication Date: 2017-02-24What does it mean to say that Native peoples exist in the present? In Beyond Settler Time Mark Rifkin investigates the dangers of seeking to include Indigenous peoples within settler temporal frameworks. Claims that Native peoples should be recognized as coeval with Euro-Americans, Rifkin argues, implicitly treat dominant non-native ideologies and institutions as the basis for defining time itself. How, though, can Native peoples be understood as dynamic and changing while also not assuming that they belong to a present inherently shared with non-natives? Drawing on physics, phenomenology, queer studies, and postcolonial theory, Rifkin develops the concept of "settler time" to address how Native peoples are both consigned to the past and inserted into the present in ways that normalize non-native histories, geographies, and expectations. Through analysis of various kinds of texts, including government documents, film, fiction, and autobiography, he explores how Native experiences of time exceed and defy such settler impositions. In underscoring the existence of multiple temporalities, Rifkin illustrates how time plays a crucial role in Indigenous peoples' expressions of sovereignty and struggles for self-determination.Bribed with Our Own Money by David R. M. Beck
ISBN: 9781496239181Publication Date: 2024-05-01In Bribed with Our Own Money David R. M. Beck analyzes the successes and failures of Indigenous nations' opposition to federal policy in the 1950s and 1960s. Focusing on case studies from six Native nations, Beck recounts how the U.S. government coerced American Indian nations to accept termination of their political relationship with the United States by threatening to withhold money that belonged to the tribes. Termination was the continuation--and, federal officials hoped, the culmination--of more than a century of policy initiatives intended to end the political relationship between Indian tribal nations and the federal government. Termination was also intended to assimilate American Indian individuals into the country's social and economic culture and to remove the remainder of reservation lands from federal trust. American Indians hoped to gain greater opportunities of self-governance and self-determination, but they wanted to do so under the protection of the federal trust relationship. Bribed with Our Own Money analyzes both successful and unsuccessful efforts of Native nations to oppose this policy within the larger context of long-standing federal abuse of tribal funds. It is the first book to view federal termination efforts grounded in bribery for what they were: a form of coercion.Cast Out of Eden by Robert Aquinas McNally
ISBN: 1496239202Publication Date: 2024-05-01John Muir is widely and rightly lauded as the nature mystic who added wilderness to the United States' vision of itself, largely through the system of national parks and wild areas his writings and public advocacy helped create. That vision, however, came at a cost: the conquest and dispossession of the tribal peoples who had inhabited and managed those same lands, in many cases for millennia. Muir argued for the preservation of wild sanctuaries that would offer spiritual enlightenment to the conquerors, not to the conquered Indigenous peoples who had once lived there. "Somehow," he wrote, "they seemed to have no right place in the landscape." Cast Out of Eden tells this neglected part of Muir's story--from Lowland Scotland and the Wisconsin frontier to the Sierra Nevada's granite heights and Alaska's glacial fjords--and his take on the tribal nations he encountered and embrace of an ethos that forced those tribes from their homelands. Although Muir questioned and worked against Euro-Americans' distrust of wild spaces and deep-seated desire to tame and exploit them, his view excluded Native Americans as fallen peoples who stained the wilderness's pristine sanctity. Fortunately, in a transformation that a resurrected and updated Muir might approve, this long-standing injustice is beginning to be undone, as Indigenous nations and the federal government work together to ensure that quintessentially American lands from Bears Ears to Yosemite serve all Americans equally.Culturally Sustaining Policymaking in Indigenous Communities by Aprille J. Phillips; James A. Banks (Series edited by); Teresa L. McCarty (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9780807769560Publication Date: 2024-01-26Discover how top-down, policy-into-practice educational mandates have adversely affected Indigenous communities in the United States' midwestern core. The author scrutinizes how leaders and intermediaries in Nebraska, involved at various tiers of policy development and reform, conceptualized and implemented school accountability policy in Indian country. In particular, Phillips explores state-directed reform efforts in a school on the Santee Sioux Reservation consistently labeled as failing and persistently experiencing intervention from outsiders presented as experts. The book interrogates who gets to define educational quality, who counts as an expert on improving schools, and what improvement actually looks like. Additionally, the text highlights the way local educators and members of the community employed everyday tactics and incognito acts of improvement to reshape school turnaround efforts. Readers will see what is possible for education policy done with--rather than to--Native communities and schools, with lessons that have relevance beyond the midwestern states. Book Features: Offers an education system reform perspective that has an impact in Indian country. Introduces the concept of culturally responsive and sustaining policymaking. Explores how policy reform efforts are implemented across tiers of the educational system, from the legislative floor to a local classroom. Shows how local actors assert agency to remake policy spaces and improve policy implementation.Decolonizing Museums by Amy Lonetree
ISBN: 9780807837146Publication Date: 2012-11-19Museum exhibitions focusing on Native American history have long been curator controlled. However, a shift is occurring, giving Indigenous people a larger role in determining exhibition content. In Decolonizing Museums, Amy Lonetree examines the complexities of these new relationships with an eye toward exploring how museums can grapple with centuries of unresolved trauma as they tell the stories of Native peoples. She investigates how museums can honor an Indigenous worldview and way of knowing, challenge stereotypical representations, and speak the hard truths of colonization within exhibition spaces to address the persistent legacies of historical unresolved grief in Native communities. Lonetree focuses on the representation of Native Americans in exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Mille Lacs Indian Museum in Minnesota, and the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways in Michigan. Drawing on her experiences as an Indigenous scholar and museum professional, Lonetree analyzes exhibition texts and images, records of exhibition development, and interviews with staff members. She addresses historical and contemporary museum practices and charts possible paths for the future curation and presentation of Native lifeways.From the Skin by Jerome Jeffery Clark (Editor); Elise Boxer (Editor); Nick Estes (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9780816542505Publication Date: 2023-11-21In this volume, contributors demonstrate the real-world application of Indigenous theory to the work they do in their own communities and how this work is driven by urgency, responsibility, and justice--work that is from the skin. In From the Skin, contributors reflect on and describe how they apply the theories and concepts of Indigenous studies to their communities, programs, and organizations, and the ways the discipline has informed and influenced the same. They show the ways these efforts advance disciplinary theories, methodologies, and praxes. Chapters cover topics including librarianship, health programs, community organizing, knowledge recovery, youth programming, and gendered violence. Through their examples, the contributors show how they negotiate their peoples' knowledge systems with knowledge produced in Indigenous studies programs, demonstrating how they understand the relationship between their people, their nations, and academia. Editors J. Jeffery Clark and Elise Boxer propose and develop the term practitioner-theorist to describe how the contributors theorize and practice knowledge within and between their nations and academia. Because they live and exist in their community, these practitioner-theorists always consider how their thinking and actions benefit their people and nations. The practitioner-theorists of this volume envision and labor toward decolonial futures where Indigenous peoples and nations exist on their own terms. Contributors Randi Lynn Boucher-Giago Elise Boxer Shawn Brigman J. Jeffery Clark Nick Estes Eric Hardy Shalene Joseph Jennifer Marley Brittani R. Orona Alexander SotoIndigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Editor); Eve Tuck (Series edited by, Editor); K. Wayne Yang (Series edited by, Editor)
ISBN: 1138585866Publication Date: 2018-06-18Indigenous and decolonizing perspectives on education have long persisted alongside colonial models of education, yet too often have been subsumed within the fields of multiculturalism, critical race theory, and progressive education. Timely and compelling, Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education features research, theory, and dynamic foundational readings for educators and educational researchers who are looking for possibilities beyond the limits of liberal democratic schooling. Featuring original chapters by authors at the forefront of theorizing, practice, research, and activism, this volume helps define and imagine the exciting interstices between Indigenous and decolonizing studies and education. Each chapter forwards Indigenous principles - such as Land as literacy and water as life - that are grounded in place-specific efforts of creating Indigenous universities and schools, community organizing and social movements, trans and Two Spirit practices, refusals of state policies, and land-based and water-based pedagogies.Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hamalainen
ISBN: 9781631496998Publication Date: 2022-09-20There is an old, deeply rooted story about America that goes like this: Columbus "discovers" a strange continent and brings back tales of untold riches. The European empires rush over, eager to stake out as much of this astonishing "New World" as possible. Though Indigenous peoples fight back, they cannot stop the onslaught. White imperialists are destined to rule the continent, and history is an irreversible march toward Indigenous destruction. Yet as with other long-accepted origin stories, this one, too, turns out to be based in myth and distortion. In Indigenous Continent, acclaimed historian Pekka Hämäläinen presents a sweeping counternarrative that shatters the most basic assumptions about American history. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, the Revolution, and other well-trodden episodes on the conventional timeline, he depicts a sovereign world of Native nations whose members, far from helpless victims of colonial violence, dominated the continent for centuries after the first European arrivals. From the Iroquois in the Northeast to the Comanches on the Plains, and from the Pueblos in the Southwest to the Cherokees in the Southeast, Native nations frequently decimated white newcomers in battle. Even as the white population exploded and colonists' land greed grew more extravagant, Indigenous peoples flourished due to sophisticated diplomacy and leadership structures. By 1776, various colonial powers claimed nearly all of the continent, but Indigenous peoples still controlled it--as Hämäläinen points out, the maps in modern textbooks that paint much of North America in neat, color-coded blocks confuse outlandish imperial boasts for actual holdings. In fact, Native power peaked in the late nineteenth century, with the Lakota victory in 1876 at Little Big Horn, which was not an American blunder, but an all-too-expected outcome. Hämäläinen ultimately contends that the very notion of "colonial America" is misleading, and that we should speak instead of an "Indigenous America" that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial. The evidence of Indigenous defiance is apparent today in the hundreds of Native nations that still dot the United States and Canada. Necessary reading for anyone who cares about America's past, present, and future, Indigenous Continent restores Native peoples to their rightful place at the very fulcrum of American history.Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States by Devon A. Mihesuah (Editor); Elizabeth Hoover (Editor); Winona LaDuke (Foreword by)
ISBN: 0806163216Publication Date: 2019-08-08"All those interested in Indigenous food systems, sovereignty issues, or environment, and their path toward recovery should read this powerful book." --Kathie L. Beebe, American Indian Quarterly Centuries of colonization and other factors have disrupted indigenous communities' ability to control their own food systems. This volume explores the meaning and importance of food sovereignty for Native peoples in the United States, and asks whether and how it might be achieved and sustained. Unprecedented in its focus and scope, this collection addresses nearly every aspect of indigenous food sovereignty, from revitalizing ancestral gardens and traditional ways of hunting, gathering, and seed saving to the difficult realities of racism, treaty abrogation, tribal sociopolitical factionalism, and the entrenched beliefs that processed foods are superior to traditional tribal fare. The contributors include scholar-activists in the fields of ethnobotany, history, anthropology, nutrition, insect ecology, biology, marine environmentalism, and federal Indian law, as well as indigenous seed savers and keepers, cooks, farmers, spearfishers, and community activists. After identifying the challenges involved in revitalizing and maintaining traditional food systems, these writers offer advice and encouragement to those concerned about tribal health, environmental destruction, loss of species habitat, and governmental food control.Indigenous Health and Justice by Karen Jarratt-Snider (Editor); Marianne O. Nielsen (Editor)
ISBN: 0816553165Publication Date: 2024-06-04Colonial oppression, systemic racism, discrimination, and poor access to a wide range of resources detract from Indigenous health and contribute to continuing health inequities and injustices. These factors have led to structural inadequacies that contribute to circular challenges such as chronic underfunding, understaffing, and culturally insensitive health-care provision. Nevertheless, Indigenous Peoples are working actively to end such legacies. In Indigenous Health and Justice contributors demonstrate how Indigenous Peoples, individuals, and communities create their own solutions. Chapters focus on both the challenges created by the legacy of settler colonialism and the solutions, strengths, and resilience of Indigenous Peoples and communities in responding to these challenges. It introduces a range of examples, such as the ways in which communities use traditional knowledge and foodways to address health disparities. Indigenous Health and Justice is the fifth volume in the Indigenous Justice series. The series editors have focused on different aspects of the many kinds of justice that affect Indigenous Peoples. This volume is for students, scholars, activists, policymakers, and health-care professionals interested in health and well-being.Indigenous Justice and Gender by Marianne O. Nielsen (Editor); Karen Jarratt-Snider (Editor)
ISBN: 0816549702Publication Date: 2023-05-02This 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 WilsonIndigenous Methodologies by Margaret Kovach
ISBN: 1487525648Publication Date: 2021-07-12Indigenous Methodologiesis a groundbreaking text. Since its original publication in 2009, it has become the most trusted guide used in the study of Indigenous methodologies and has been adopted in university courses around the world. It provides a conceptual framework for implementing Indigenous methodologies and serves as a useful entry point for those wishing to learn more broadly about Indigenous research. The second edition incorporates new literature along with substantial updates, including a thorough discussion of Indigenous theory and analysis, new chapters on community partnership and capacity building, an added focus on oracy and other forms of knowledge dissemination, and a renewed call to decolonize the academy. The second edition also includes discussion questions to enhance classroom interaction with the text. In a field that continues to grow and evolve, and as universities and researchers strive to learn and apply Indigenous-informed research, this important new edition introduces readers to the principles and practices of Indigenous methodologies.An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
ISBN: 9780807000403Publication Date: 2014-09-16New York Times Bestseller Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples' Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: "The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them." Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples' history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.Indigenous Perspectives of North America by Enikó Sepsi (Editor); Judit Nagy (Editor); Miklòs Vassànyi; Jànos Kenyeres
ISBN: 9781443859158Publication Date: 2014-07-01The present volume brings to North American Native Studies -- with its rich tradition and accumulated expertise in the Central European region -- the new complexities and challenges of contemporary Native reality. The umbrella theme 'Indigenous perspectives' brings together researchers from a great variety of disciplines, focusing on issues such as democracy and human rights, international law, multiculturalism, peace and security, economic and scientific development, sustainability, literature, and arts and culture, as well as religion.The thirty-five topical and thought-provoking articles written in English, French and Spanish offer a solid platform for further critical investigations and a useful tool for classroom discussions in a wide variety of academic fields.Land Is Kin by Dana Lloyd; Judge Abby Abinanti (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9780700635894Publication Date: 2023-11-16Responding to Vine Deloria, Jr.'s call for all people to "become involved" in the struggle to protect Indigenous sacred sites, Dana Lloyd's Land Is Kin proposes a rethinking of sacred sites, and a rethinking of even land itself. Deloria suggested using the principle of religious freedom, but this principle has failed Indigenous peoples for decades. Lloyd argues that religious freedom fails Indigenous claimants because settler law creates a tension between two competing rights--one party's religious freedom and another party's property rights. In this contest, the right of property will always win. Through an analysis of the 1988 US Supreme Court case Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, which she interprets as a case about sovereignty and the meaning of land, Lloyd proposes a multilayered understanding of land and the different roles it can simultaneously play. Rejecting the binary logic of sacred religion versus secular property, Lloyd uses the legal dispute over the High Country--an area of the Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California sacred to the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa Indigenous nations--to show that there are at least five different, but not equally valid, ways to understand land in the Lyng case: home, property, sacred site, wilderness, and kin. To protect the High Country, the Yurok filed a religious freedom lawsuit but then proceeded to describe the land as their home in court. They lobbied for protecting the High Country through a wilderness designation even as they continued to argue that they had been managing it for centuries. They have purchased large parcels of ancestral land and also declare the land their kin, a relationship that ostensibly excludes the possibility of ownership. Land Is Kin demonstrates the complexity of land in contemporary religious, political, and legal discourse. By drawing on Indigenous perspectives on the land as kin, Lloyd points toward a framework that shifts sovereignty away from binary oppositions--between property and sacred site, between the federal government and Native nations--towards seeing the land itself as sovereign.Living Resistance by Kaitlin B. Curtice (Contribution by)
ISBN: 1587435713Publication Date: 2023-03-07In an era in which "resistance" has become tokenized, Indigenous author Kaitlin Curtice reclaims it as a basic human calling. We each have a role to play in the world right where we are, and our everyday acts of resistance hold us all together.Native Foods by Michael D. Wise
ISBN: 1682262383Publication Date: 2023-06-22In Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History, Michael D. Wise confronts four common myths about Indigenous food history: that most Native communities did not practice agriculture; that Native people were primarily hunters; that Native people were usually hungry; and that Native people never developed taste or cuisine. Wise argues that colonial expectations of food and agriculture have long structured ways of seeing (and of not seeing) Native land and labor. Combining original historical research with interdisciplinary perspectives and informed by the work of Indigenous food sovereignty advocates and activists, this study sheds new light on the historical roles of Native American cuisine in American history and the significance of ongoing colonial processes in present-day discussions about the place of Native foods and Native history in our evolving worlds of taste, justice, and politics.Native Nations by Nancy Bonvillain
ISBN: 9781538170403Publication Date: 2024-04-09Combining historical background with discussion of contemporary Native nations and their living cultures, this comprehensive text introduces students to the many Indigenous peoples in North America. Organized by region to highlight cultural practices, each part covers the topography, climate, and natural resources in the area and describes the range of cultural practices and beliefs among groups. Subsequent tribe-specific chapters are devoted to different Native communities, addressing both their history and contemporary lives. New to the Third Edition: New Chapter 26, "Contemporary Challenges" explores the issues facing Native communities today, including environmental crises, voting rights, residential school investigations New Chapter 27, "The Arts, Pop Culture, and Representation" examines contemporary Indigenous writers, musicians, and film makers as well as the challenges Indigenous peoples face with misrepresentation Fully revised art program with a wealth of images and maps explores different Native cultures Updated statistics on social and economic data as well as demographic profilesNative Nations: A Millennium of Indigenous Change and Persistence by Kathleen DuVal
ISBN: 9780525511038Publication Date: 2024-04-09"An essential American history" (The Wall Street Journal) that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today "A feat of both scholarship and storytelling."--Claudio Saunt, author of Unworthy Republic Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed. A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread across North America. So, when Europeans showed up in the sixteenth century, they encountered societies they did not understand--those having developed differently from their own--and whose power they often underestimated. For centuries afterward, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests. In Native Nations, we see how Mohawks closely controlled trade with the Dutch--and influenced global markets--and how Quapaws manipulated French colonists. Power dynamics shifted after the American Revolution, but Indigenous people continued to command much of the continent's land and resources. Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged new alliances and encouraged a controversial new definition of Native identity to attempt to wall off U.S. ambitions. The Cherokees created institutions to assert their sovereignty on the global stage, and the Kiowas used their power in the west to regulate the passage of white settlers across their territory. In this important addition to the growing tradition of North American history centered on Indigenous nations, Kathleen DuVal shows how the definitions of power and means of exerting it shifted over time, but the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant--and will continue far into the future.Native Nations: Cultures and Histories of Native North America by Nancy Bonvillain
ISBN: 9781538170403Publication Date: 2024-04-09Combining historical background with discussion of contemporary Native nations and their living cultures, this comprehensive text introduces students to the many Indigenous peoples in North America. Organized by region to highlight cultural practices, each part covers the topography, climate, and natural resources in the area and describes the range of cultural practices and beliefs among groups. Subsequent tribe-specific chapters are devoted to different Native communities, addressing both their history and contemporary lives. New to the Third Edition: New Chapter 26, "Contemporary Challenges" explores the issues facing Native communities today, including environmental crises, voting rights, residential school investigations New Chapter 27, "The Arts, Pop Culture, and Representation" examines contemporary Indigenous writers, musicians, and film makers as well as the challenges Indigenous peoples face with misrepresentation Fully revised art program with a wealth of images and maps explores different Native cultures Updated statistics on social and economic data as well as demographic profilesNew Indians, Old Wars by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
ISBN: 0252031660Publication Date: 2007-05-14Challenging received American history and forging a new path for Native American studies Addressing Native American Studies' past, present, and future, the essays in New Indians, Old Wars tackle the discipline head-on, presenting a radical revision of the popular view of the American West in the process. Instead of luxuriating in its past glories or accepting the widespread historians' view of the West as a shared place, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues that it should be fundamentally understood as stolen. Firmly grounded in the reality of a painful past, Cook-Lynn understands the story of the American West as teaching the political language of land theft and tyranny. She argues that to remedy this situation, Native American studies must be considered and pursued as its own discipline, rather than as a subset of history or anthropology. She makes an impassioned claim that such a shift, not merely an institutional or theoretical change, could allow Native American studies to play an important role in defending the sovereignty of indigenous nations today.The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk
ISBN: 9780300244052Publication Date: 2023-04-25National Bestseller Winner of the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction * Finalist for the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Award in History * Winner of 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction Named a best book of 2023 by New Yorker, Esquire, Barnes & Noble A New York Times Notable Book of 2023 * A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction of 2023 * An NPR "Book We Love" for 2023 "Eloquent and comprehensive. . . . In the book's sweeping synthesis, standard flashpoints of U.S. history take on new meaning."--Kathleen DuVal, Wall Street Journal "In accounts of American history, Indigenous peoples are often treated as largely incidental--either obstacles to be overcome or part of a narrative separate from the arc of nation-building. Blackhawk . . . [shows] that Native communities have, instead, been inseparable from the American story all along."--Washington Post Book World, "Books to Read in 2023" A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, as a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that * European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success; * Native nations helped shape England's crisis of empire; * the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior; * California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War; * the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West; * twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy. Blackhawk's retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.Sifters: Native American Women's Lives by Theda Perdue (Editor)
ISBN: 0195130812Publication Date: 2001-03-29In this edited volume, Theda Perdue, a nationally known expert on Indian history and southern women's history, offers a rich collection of biographical essays on Native American women. From Pocahontas, a Powhatan woman of the seventeenth century, to Ada Deer, the Menominee woman who headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1990s, the essays span four centuries. Each one recounts the experiences of women from vastly different cultural traditions--the hunting and gathering of Kumeyaay culture of Delfina Cuero, the pueblo society of San Ildefonso potter Maria Martinez, and the powerful matrilineal kinship system of Molly Brant's Mohawks. Contributors focus on the ways in which different women have fashioned lives that remain firmly rooted in their identity as Native women. Perdue's introductory essay ties together the themes running through the biographical sketches, including the cultural factors that have shaped the lives of Native women, particularly economic contributions, kinship, and belief, and the ways in which historical events, especially in United States Indian policy, have engendered change.Unsettled Borders by Felicity Amaya Schaeffer
ISBN: 1478017945Publication Date: 2022-08-29In Unsettled Borders Felicity Amaya Schaeffer examines the ongoing settler colonial war over the US-Mexico border from the perspective of Apache, Tohono O'odham, and Maya who fight to protect their sacred land. Schaeffer traces the scientific and technological development of militarized border surveillance across time and space from Spanish colonial lookout points in Arizona and Mexico to the Indian wars, when the US cavalry hired Native scouts to track Apache fleeing into Mexico, to the occupation of the Tohono O'odham reservation and the recent launch of robotic bee swarms. Labeled "Optics Valley," Arizona builds on a global history of violent dispossession and containment of Native peoples and migrants by branding itself as a profitable hub for surveillance. Schaeffer reverses the logic of borders by turning to Indigenous sacredsciences: ancestral land-based practices that are critical to reversing the ecological and social violence of surveillance, extraction, and occupation.When Did Indians Become Straight? by Mark Rifkin
ISBN: 0199781230Publication Date: 2010-01-01When Did Indians Become Straight? explores the complex relationship between contested U.S. notions of normality and shifting forms of Native American governance and self-representation. Examining a wide range of texts (including captivity narratives, fiction, government documents, and anthropological tracts), Mark Rifkin offers a cultural and literary history of the ways Native peoples have been inserted into Euramerican discourses of sexuality and how Native intellectuals have sought to reaffirm their peoples' sovereignty and self-determination.Yáamay by Camaray Davalos (Editor); Rebecca Macarro (Editor); Avelaka Macarro (Editor)
ISBN: 1942279345Publication Date: 2023-07-01Yáamay: An Anthology of Feminine Perspectives Across Indigenous California is a collection of Indigenous poetry, artwork, and essays specific to what is now known as Southern California. The lead authors separated these pieces Into the four natural parts of our story: Tówla (Root), Kúp (Sleep, Dormant), Wólnish (Cultivate), and $ó'a (Bloom), with each section exploring the eras of pre-contact, post-contact, present, and future. Collectively, these pieces portray the multifarious effects of colonization on Indigenous people of this area, from the California Mission system, to the traumatic assimilationist policies that are still felt today. At the same time, a focus on ancestral teachings, the nostalgia of growing up on the rez, and the joys of (self)love and independence can be found in a way that defies these wounds.
Relevant Journals:
- American Indian and Alaska Mental Health Research
- American Indian Culture and Research Journal
- American Indian Law Review
- American Indian Quarterly
- Journal of American Indian Education
- Native American and Indigenous Studies Association
- Studies in American Indian Literatures
- Tribal College: Journal of American Indian Higher Education
- Tribal Law Journal
- Wicazo Sa Review
Search for articles using the databases below:
- America: History and Life This link opens in a new windowAmerica: History and Life indexes literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. With indexing for 1,700 journals from as far back as 1910, this database is a strong bibliographic reference tool for students and scholars of U.S. and Canadian history. This database also includes citations and links to book and media reviews. The predominantly English-language journal coverage is balanced by an international perspective on topics and…America: History and Life indexes literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. With indexing for 1,700 journals from as far back as 1910, this database is a strong bibliographic reference tool for students and scholars of U.S. and Canadian history. This database also includes citations and links to book and media reviews. The predominantly English-language journal coverage is balanced by an international perspective on topics and events, including abstracts in English of articles published in more than 40 languages.
When starting your research in American Indian studies, start by gathering background information on your topic. Tertiary sources, such as encyclopedias and reference databases, are good places to start.
Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes by Carl Waldman; Molly Braun (Illustrator)
ISBN: 0816014213Publication Date: 1985-01-01This fully updated reference explores more than 200 North American tribes, prehistoric peoples, and civilizations. Arranged alphabetically by tribe or group, this comprehensive work offers 60 new entries on tribes not covered in the previous editions. The accessible text summarizes the historical record and includes present-day tribal affairs and issues. The book also covers diet, housing, tools, clothing, art, rituals, and more.Encyclopedia of United States Indian Policy and Law SET by Paul Finkelman (Editor); Tim Alan Garrison (Editor)
ISBN: 9781933116983Publication Date: 2008-12-23An essential reference on the reciprocal role that U.S. and Native policy and law have played in American political development Created by a culturally diverse editorial board of major scholars and containing invaluable bibliographic material not found in other publications, this definitive two-volume set examines the history and impact of U.S. relations with Native Americans. Extensive essays trace policies from the Continental Congress to the present day--including the role that managing the "Indian question" has played in American political development--while A to Z entries cover everything critical to a full understanding of the context to U.S./Native American relations, from history, politics, and sociology to civil rights and culture. The set is also the first reference of its kind to incorporate the expanding scholarship reflecting both the Native American viewpoint on and response to federal policies and initiatives over time.Native American Issues by William N. Thompson
ISBN: 1851097414Publication Date: 2005-08-05This handbook provides an unbiased, in-depth assessment of the struggles, successes, and status of Native Americans in what is now the United States from the time of the first European settlers to the present. Native American Issues: A Reference Handbook, Second Edition explores the history, problems, and contemporary issues faced by peoples of Native American heritage. From the Indian Removal Act of 1830 to the "Twenty Points" platform advanced by the American Indian Movement in the 1970s to the massive budget cuts of the 1980s, readers will discover how the well-being of Native Americans has been affected by federal and state policies. Refocusing the first edition's underlying theme of sovereignty to highlight issues related to community, this extensively updated volume addresses the greatest single change in the condition of Native Americans in the last decade--the proliferation of gambling enterprises. Issues such as land claims, use of natural resources, sacred sites, governments, and stereotyping are examined from the perspective of strengthening community.Tribal Administration Handbook by Rebecca M. Webster (Editor); Joseph Bauerkemper (Editor)
ISBN: 9781938065149Publication Date: 2022-07-01A direct response to the needs and ambitions articulated by tribal administrators and leaders, this handbook seeks to serve practitioners, students, researchers, and community members alike. It grew out of an ongoing collaboration among scholars and practitioners from tribal nations, universities, tribal colleges, and nonprofit organizations who are developing practical and teaching resources in the field of tribal administration and governance. Designed as a readable, accessible volume, it focuses on three key areas: tribal management, funding and delivering core services, and sovereign tribes engaging settler governments. While the chapters complement one another by presenting a coherent and unified constellation of voices that illuminates a shared terrain of practical Indigenous governance, each chapter ultimately stands alone to accommodate a variety of needs and interests with specific best practices, quick-reference executive summaries, and practitioner notes to aid lesson applications. This humble collection of remarkable voices initiates a conversation about tribal administration that will hopefully continue to grow in service to Native nations.
Statistics can be a useful tool when researching populations or groups.
- Social Explorer This link opens in a new windowNOTE: User registration (free) is required for this database. Social Explorer provides access to current and historical census data and demographic information. The web interface lets users create maps and reports to illustrate, analyze, and understand a variety of data, including average household incomes, population density, gender distribution, marital status, occupations, and more.
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