Indigenous Native American

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history. This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches.

From the acclaimed Ojibwe author and professor Anton Treuer comes an essential book of questions and answers for Native and non-Native young listeners alike.

In this strange and wonderful book, thirty elders of the ancient Hopi tribe of Northern Arizona—a people who regard themselves as the first inhabitants of America—freely reveal the Hopi worldview for the first time in written form. The Hopi kept this view a secret for countless centuries, and anthropologists have long struggled to understand it. Now they record their myths and legends, and the meaning of their religious rituals and ceremonies as a gift to future generations.

Anton Treuer has been at the forefront of the battle to revitalize Ojibwe for many years. In this impassioned argument, he discusses the interrelationship between language and culture, the problems of language loss, strategies and tactics for resisting, and the inspiring stories of successful language warriors. He recounts his own sometimes hilarious struggle to learn Ojibwe as an adult, and he depicts the astonishing success of the language program at Lac Courte Oreilles, where a hundred children now speak Ojibwe as their first language.

The story of Native peoples’ resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions and a call for environmentalists to learn from the indigenous community’s rich history of activism.

While Western accounts of North American history traditionally start with European colonization, Indigenous histories of North America—or Turtle Island—stretch back millennia. Drawing on comparative analysis, firsthand Indigenous accounts, extensive historical writings, and his own experience, Omaha Tribal member, Cherokee citizen, and teacher Taylor Keen presents a comprehensive re-imagining of the ancient and more recent history of this continent’s oldest cultures.

In her debut collection of short stories, Islands of Decolonial Love, renowned writer and activist Leanne Simpson vividly explores the lives of contemporary Indigenous Peoples and communities, especially those of her own Nishnaabeg nation. Found on reserves, in cities and small towns, in bars and curling rinks, canoes and community centres, doctors offices and pickup trucks, Simpson's characters confront the often heartbreaking challenge of pairing the desire to live loving and observant lives with a constant struggle to simply survive....

In this followup to his hugely popular Midnight Storm Moonless Sky: Indigenous Horror Stories, Blackfoot storyteller Alex Soop plunges us again into enthralling tales that mix reality with dark terror. Within its stories, Whisper at Night and They Will Come reveals ancient theories of the paranormal, post apocalyptic scenarios, impossible wells of grief, and monstrous phobias. Soop scares the wits out of listeners, all the while uncovering overlooked social anxieties and racism affecting Indigenous Peoples across North America.

Athletics in Central and North American societies go much further back than most people realize. The native peoples took their sports just as seriously as any of today’s most fervent soccer fans. One major difference between modern sports and these aboriginal games is that the native people's sports often had strong religious content, and games were sometimes seen as literal substitutes for war, played to resolve disputes between towns or tribes.

Stepping beyond the shape of a footprint and into the unseen story of the track, veteran wilderness guide Tamarack Song takes you inside the eyes and mind of an intuitive tracker, with intimate stories where Frogs show the way out of the woods, scat reveals life histories, and Bears demonstrate how to find missing people.

When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom. In her absence, the landscape had been altered beyond recognition, her tribal government swayed by corporate interests, and her community burdened by a surge in violence and addiction. Three years later, when Lissa learned that a young white oil worker, Kristopher “KC” Clarke, had disappeared from his reservation worksite, she became particularly concerned. No one knew where Clarke had gone.

Most Americans have heard of the Little Bighorn, the 1876 battle in which a band of Lakota Sioux and their allies wiped out most of the 7th US Cavalry under the command of George Armstrong Custer. The movie images are of fierce warriors in long eagle feather headdresses flowing behind them as they gallop across the plains on nimble Indian ponies.

Life Among the Qallunaat is the story of Mini Aodla Freeman’s experiences growing up in the Inuit communities of James Bay and her journey in the 1950s from her home to the strange land and stranger customs of the Qallunaat, those living south of the Arctic. Her extraordinary story, sometimes humourous and sometimes heartbreaking, illustrates an Inuit woman’s movement between worlds and ways of understanding. It also provides a clear-eyed record of the changes that swept through Inuit communities in the 1940s and 1950s.

The most enduring feature of US 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, with 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.

Learning Native Wisdom explains why achieving a sustainable culture is more important than any other challenge we face today. Although there are many measures of a society's progress, Holthaus warns that only a shift away from our current culture of short-term abundance, founded on a belief in infinite economic growth, will represent true advancement. In societies that value the longevity of people, culture, and the environment, subsistence and spirituality soon become closely allied with sustainability.

In this direct, concise, and essential volume, Harold R. Johnson examines the justice system's failures to deliver "peace and good order" to Indigenous people. He explores the part that he understands himself to have played in that mismanagement, drawing on insights he has gained from the experience; insights into the roots and immediate effects of how the justice system has failed Indigenous people, in all the communities in which they live; and insights into the struggle for peace and good order for Indigenous people now.

Authoritative and immediate, this is the classic account of the most powerful of the American Indian tribes. T. R. Fehrenbach traces the Comanches' rise to power, from their prehistoric origins to their domination of the high plains for more than a century until their demise in the face of Anglo-American expansion.

Reclaiming Two-Spirits decolonizes the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them.

Structures of Indifference examines an Indigenous life and death in a Canadian city and what it reveals about the ongoing history of colonialism. At the heart of this story is a 34-hour period in September 2008. During that day and half, Brian Sinclair, a middle-aged, non-Status Anishinaabeg resident of Manitoba's capital city, arrived in the emergency room of the Health Sciences Centre, Winnipeg's major downtown hospital, was left untreated and unattended to, and ultimately died from an easily treatable infection.

The received idea of Native American history - as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did 150 Sioux die at the hands of the US Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and novels, David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative.