Indigenous Politics

The Musician Healer resurrects a long-forgotten role for musicians and provides clear guidance for preparation and self-development as a musician healer in order to reactivate this role for the modern world. It begins with the author’s personal musical story that draws upon her Mi’kmaq/Abenaki First Nations and French Canadian roots, followed by the history of musician healers from ancient Egypt and India. Runningdeer then explores the energetic aspects of music healing, especially the quality of personal energies that a musician channels through her music.

“I love food” Nakkiah Lui says, and in the next breath whispers “so give us back our land”. In First Eat, a confrontational, raw and highly personal exploration of food politics, power and body sovereignty, Nakkiah Lui asks how our meals would look different if First Nations people owned the land from which the food came. First Eat is about more than just food, it’s an aural feast for a rich future.

One cannot turn on the news today without a report on an extreme-weather event or the latest update on Antarctica. But while our politicians argue, the truth is that climate change is already here. Nobody knows this better than Indigenous peoples, who, having developed an intimate relationship with ecosystems over generations, have observed these changes for decades. For them, climate change is not an abstract concept or policy issue, but the reality of daily life.

I årene 1927-1930 var den danske opdagelsesrejsende Henning Haslund-Christensen karavanefører for en stor, kostbar og farlig ekspedition i Centralasien. Karavanen bestod af flere hundrede mænd og kameler, og den bevægede sig både gennem snelandskaber og ørkensand, passerede lovløse områder og krydsede Gobi-ørkenen, hvor tilrejsende ikke før havde vovet sig ind.

How the West Was Drawn explores the geographic and historical experiences of the Pawnees, the Iowas, and the Lakotas during the European and American contest for imperial control of the Great Plains during the 18th and 19th centuries. David Bernstein argues that the American West was a collaborative construction between Native peoples and Euro-American empires that developed cartographic processes and culturally specific maps, which in turn reflected encounter and conflict between settler states and indigenous peoples.

Native Country of the Heart is the writer and activist Cherrie Moraga's love letter to her "unlettered" mother. It begins with her mother, Elvira Isabel Moraga, who as a child, along with her siblings, was hired out by her own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The lives of Cherrie and her mother, and of their people, are woven together in a story of critical reflection and deep personal revelation as Moraga charts her own coming to consciousness alongside the heartbreaking story of her mother's decline.

After One Hundred Winters confronts the harsh truth that the United States was founded on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people and asks what reconciliation might mean in light of this haunted history. In this timely and urgent book, settler historian Margaret Jacobs tells the stories of the individuals and communities who are working together to heal historical wounds - and reveals how much we have to gain by learning from our history instead of denying it.

Eine deutsche Umweltschützerin entscheidet sich für die Liebe zu einem Massai – und für ein Leben in einer der patriarchalsten Kulturen der Welt. Auf einem Forschungsaufenthalt in Afrika begegnet die Biologin Stephanie Fuchs Sokoine, einem traditionell lebenden Massai. Die beiden verlieben sich, doch die Hürden sind groß, die ihrer Beziehung im Wege stehen. Schließlich geben sie ihrer Liebe eine Chance und Stephanie Fuchs zieht nach Tansania in Sokoines Dorf. Bald schon steht sie vor großen Herausforderungen: Sie muss ihren Platz in der traditionell lebenden Dorfgemeinschaft erst finden.

Aboriginal lawyer, writer and filmmaker Larissa Behrendt has long been fascinated by the story of Eliza Fraser, who was purportedly captured by the Butchulla people after she was shipwrecked on their island off the Queensland coast in 1836. In this deeply personal audiobook, Behrendt uses Eliza's tale as a starting point to interrogate how Aboriginal people – and indigenous people of other countries – have been portrayed in their colonisers' stories.

In Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World archaeologist Catherine M. Cameron provides an eye-opening comparative study of the profound impact captives of warfare and raiding have had on small-scale societies through time. Cameron provides a new point of orientation for archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars by illuminating the impact that captive-taking and enslavement have had on cultural change, with important implications for understanding the past.

In Extinction and the Human, Timothy Sweet ponders the realities of animal extinction and endangerment and the often divergent Native American and Euro-American narratives that surround them. He focuses especially on the force of human impact on megafauna—mammoths, whales, and the North American bison. Ultimately, he argues, it is the critical assessment of ideas of human exceptionalism that provides a necessary counterpoint both to apologies for human mastery over nature and deep ecology's attempts to erase the human.

In Colonizing Paradise, historian Jefferson Dillman charts the broad spectrum of sentiments that British citizens and travelers held regarding their colonial possessions in the West Indies. Because British sentiments in the Caribbean located danger and evil not just in indigenous populations but in Spanish Catholics as well, Dillman’s work begins with the arrival of Spanish explorers and conquistadors. Colonizing Paradise spans the arrival of English ships and continues through the early nineteenth century and the colonial era.

The Navajo tribe, the Diné, are the largest tribe in the United States and live across the American Southwest. But over a century ago, they were nearly wiped out by the Long Walk, a forced removal of most of the Diné people to a military-controlled reservation in New Mexico. Send a Runner tells the story of a Navajo family using the power of running to honor their ancestors and the power of history to explain why the Long Walk happened.

Stories define us. They tell us who we are or, at least, who we think we are. The American story of westward expansion draws upon heroic tales of courage and perseverance and the "pioneer spirit". But settlers and their descendants also spread false narratives about Indians in order to justify ruinous private and public acts. The stories we heard and the tales we hear even now give people cover to behave abominably. And this abominable behavior has economic effect.

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.

Often remembered as the president who died shortly after taking office, William Henry Harrison remains misunderstood by most Americans. Before becoming the ninth president of the United States in 1841, Harrison was instrumental in shaping the early years of westward expansion. Robert M. Owens now explores that era through the lens of Harrison’s career, providing a new synthesis of his role in the political development of Indiana Territory and in shaping Indian policy in the Old Northwest.

A thriving fur trade post between 1830 and 1860, Fort Clark, in what is today western North Dakota, also served as a way station for artists, scientists, missionaries, soldiers, and other western chroniclers traveling along the Upper Missouri River. The written and visual legacies of these visitors have long been the primary sources of information on the cultures of the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, the peoples who met the first fur traders in the area. This book is the first account of the fur trade at Fort Clark to integrate new archaeological evidence into the history.

This first comprehensive work on women in pre-Columbian cultures describes gender roles and relationships in the Americas from 12,000 B.C. to the A.D. 1500s. Utilizing many key archaeological works, Karen Olsen Bruhns and Karen E. Stothert redress some of the long-standing male bias in writing about ancient Native American lifeways. The authors pay particular attention to the problems of interpreting archaeological remains and the uses of historic and ethnographic evidence in reconstructing the past.

For thousands of years two distinct cultures evolved unaware of one another’s existence. Separated by what one culture called The Great Sea and known to the other as the Atlantic Ocean, the course of each culture’s future changed irreversibly 400 years ago.

Black Snake is the story of four leaders - LaDonna Allard, Jasilyn Charger, Lisa DeVille, and Kandi White - and their fight against the pipeline. It is the story of a new generation of environmental activists, galvanized at Standing Rock, becoming the protectors of America's natural resources.