Indigenous Native American

A Promise Kept explores the circumstances and implications of McGirt v. Oklahoma, likely the most significant Indian law case in well over a hundred years. Combining legal analysis and historical context, this book gives an in-depth, accessible account of how the case unfolded and what it might mean for Oklahomans, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and other tribes throughout the United States.

Sacred Sites is a singular and memorable account of the evolution of the Southern California landscape, reflecting the riches of both Native knowledge and Western scientific thought. Founded on meticulous research, Suntree offers a rare and poetic vision combining Western and indigenous thinking to create an ever-deepening sense of a place and its people.

Acclaimed historians Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green paint a moving portrait of the infamous Trail of Tears. Despite protests from statesmen like Davy Crockett, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay, a dubious 1838 treaty drove 17,000 mostly Christian Cherokee from their lush Appalachian homeland to barren plains beyond the Mississippi. For 4,000, this brutal forced march lead only to their deaths.

A frantic young girl flees the reservation to escape the horrors of abuse at the hands of her adoptive family. Despising her white father they blame for the death of the girl's mother. The man is driven out only to be found dead along a lonely stretch of dirt road. Suffering through a long and desperate struggle on the back streets of Albuquerque, the girl somehow manages to survive, and against all odds, eventually claws her way up from the depths of degradation to a life of success beyond her wildest imagining.

Written by Wahpetunwan Dakota scholar and activist Waziyatawin of Pezihutazizi Otunwe, What Does Justice Look Like? offers an opportunity now and for future generations to learn the long-untold history and what it has meant for the Dakota People. On that basis, the book offers the further opportunity to explore what we can do between us as Peoples to reverse the patterns of genocide and oppression and instead to do justice with a depth of good faith, commitment, and action that would be genuinely new for Native and non-Native relations.

An icy chill foretells a harsh winter for the Navajo people—and for perpetually down on his luck Harley Ponyboy the situation grows increasingly desperate. What evil is this that dogs his every step? When a lucky lottery ticket comes his way, Harley uses the new resources to search for a lost love—only to find she has fallen to appalling depths. His stubborn resolve to help puts him on a collision course with her abusive companion . . . and with his own mortality.

From a New Yorker staff writer and PEN award winner, a blend of memoir, history, and reportage on one of the most complex and least understood states in America. “In Alabama, we exist at the border of blessing and disaster….” Alexis Okeowo grew up in Montgomery—the former seat of the...

With the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Choctaw people began their journey over the Trail of Tears from their homelands in Mississippi to the new lands of the Choctaw Nation. Suffering a death rate of nearly 20 percent due to exposure, disease, mismanagement, and fraud, they limped into Indian Territory, or, as they knew it, the Land of the Dead (the route taken by the souls of Choctaw people after death on their way to the Choctaw afterlife). Their first few years in the new nation affirmed their name for the land.

Before Indian casinos sprouted up around the country, a few enterprising tribes got their start in gambling by opening bingo parlors. A group of women on the Oneida Indian Reservation just outside Green Bay, Wisconsin, introduced bingo in 1976 simply to pay a few bills. Bingo not only paid the light bill at the struggling civic center but was soon financing vital health and housing services for tribal elderly and poor.

The indigenous Navajo way of life has been in "survival mode" since the introduction of Eurocentric culture in the Americas. Darryl Benally tells the true story of what it is like growing up Navajo, surviving the challenges of navigating in a multicultural society and an unjust system, while layering the pages with knowledge about the Navajo culture itself. Darryl Benally's story begins with life on a Navajo Reservation with all the cards stacked against him—being exposed to alcoholism, domestic violence, and enduring a government sponsored boarding school.

When the American government was founded, the Founders and Framers assumed a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That government is dying. It is under the authority of not we, the people, but rather a small elite that is trying to snuff out the great experiment of man ruling himself - the common man - the man that within the right system of government can attain his purpose to achieve happiness.

While back on tribal land, Mud Sawpole uncovers an illegal fracking operation underway that threatens the Kiowas’ ancestral homeland. But there’s an even greater threat: a local businessman involved in artifact thefts is murdered and a respected tribe elder faces accusation of the crime. After being roped in by her cousin, Denny, they begin to investigate the death while also pursuing evidence to permanently stop frackers from destroying Kiowa land, water, and livelihoods. When answers evade her, Mud embraces Kiowa tribal customs to find the answers that she seeks.

After four women disappear from the Taos Pueblo reservation, Deputy Eva “Lightning Dance” Duran dives into the case. For her, it’s personal. Among the missing is her best friend, Paloma, a heroin addict who left behind an eighteen-year-old son. Eva senses a lack of interest from the department as she embarks on the investigation. But their reluctance only fuels her fire. Eva teams up with tribal police officer and longtime friend Cruz “Wolf Song” Romero to tackle a mystery that could both ruin her reputation and threaten her standing in the tribe.

Deadfall tracks Charlie Yazzie, Thomas Begay, and Harley Ponyboy into unfamiliar territory. When a family member unexpectedly dies, a debilitating sense of loss overcomes our friends on the reservation. The ties that have bound them begin to unravel. What witch's evil is at work? Is the bond forever broken? Or is there a connection to the ancient past that might bring this malevolent aura to an end?

Using a traditional Yakama tale as a motif, "Coyote’s Swing" combines the author’s firsthand experiences as a consulting psychologist with rare history and sociocultural critique, revealing how the U.S. mental health system reframes Native American reactions to oppression and marginalization into "mental disorders" and "mental illness," and how the Indian Health Service’s contemporary practices echo historical injustices.

En los años veinte, la comunidad india de los Osage en Oklahoma era la población de mayor renta per cápita del mundo. El petróleo que yacía bajo sus propiedades les convirtió en millonarios: construyeron mansiones, tenían chóferes privados y mandaban a sus hijos a estudiar a Europa. Pero un espiral de violencia asoló esta comunidad indígena cuando sus miembros empezaron a morir y a desaparecer en extrañas circunstancias. La familia de una mujer Osage, Mollie Burkhart, se convirtió en un objetivo principal.

A broad range of perspectives from natives and nonnatives makes this book the most complete account and analysis of the Lakota ghost dance ever published. A revitalization movement that swept across native communities of the West in the late 1880s, the ghost dance took firm hold among the Lakotas, perplexed and alarmed government agents, sparked the intervention of the US Army and culminated in the massacre of hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in December 1890.

The Natchez Indians: A History to 1735 is the story of the Natchez Indians as revealed through accounts of Spanish, English, and French explorers, missionaries, soldiers, and colonists, and in the archaeological record. Because of their strategic location on the Mississippi River, the Natchez Indians played a crucial part in the European struggle for control of the Lower Mississippi Valley.

In 1832, the Sauk warrior Black Hawk attempted to forge an alliance to preserve the homelands of the confederated tribes on the eastern bank of the Mississippi. Patrick J. Jung examines the causes, course, and consequences of the ensuing war with the U.S. Correcting mistakes that plagued previous histories, and drawing on recent ethno-historical interpretations, Jung shows the outcome can be understood by discussing intertribal rivalry, military ineptitude, and racial dynamics.

In The Northern Cheyenne Exodus in History and Memory, James N. Leiker and Ramon Powers explore how the event has been remembered, told, and retold. They examine the recollections of Indians and settlers and their descendants, and they consider local history, mass-media treatments, and literature to draw thought-provoking conclusions about how this story has changed over time.