Native American Culture

Every schoolchild knows the story of how Pocahontas saved the life of Captain John Smith, but that's not the whole story. The Native American princess Pocahontas was born near the end of the sixteenth century as the daughter of Powhatan, chief of the Powhatan confederacy. It was Pocahontas, known as Matoaka by her clan, who interceded on behalf of John Smith in 1608 and then persuaded her father to bring food to the starving colonists at Jamestown.

On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an unsettling discovery. A history buff since early childhood, expensively educated at university - a history major, no less! - he's reached middle age with a third-grader's grasp of early America. In fact, he's mislaid more than a century of American history, the period separating Columbus' landing in 1492 from the arrival of English colonists at Jamestown in 16-oh-something. Did nothing happen in between?

Twelve-year-old Sumiko feels her life has been made up of two parts: before Pearl Harbor and after it. The good part and the bad part. Raised on a flower farm in California, Sumiko is used to being the only Japanese girl in her class. Even when the other kids tease her, she always has had her flowers and family to go home to. That all changes after the horrific events of Pearl Harbor.

Apple is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly red on the outside, white on the inside. Eric Gansworth tells his story in Apple (Skin to the Core). The story of his family, of Onondaga among Tuscaroras, of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds. Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking.

More than 20,000 American Indians served in the Civil War, yet their stories have often been left out of the history books. In Deadly Aim, Sally M. Walker explores the extraordinary lives of Michigan’s Anishinaabe sharpshooters. These brave soldiers served with honor and heroism in the line of duty, despite enduring broken treaties, loss of tribal lands, and racism.

Climate change is today's news, but it isn't a new phenomenon. Centuries-long cycles of heating and cooling are well documented for Europe and the North Atlantic. These variations in climate, including the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), AD 900 to 1300, and the early centuries of the Little Ice Age (LIA), AD 1300 to 1600, had a substantial impact on the cultural history of Europe.

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.

Physician, activist, and author Charles Alexander Eastman was the first Native American certified in Western medicine and one of the first authors of any background to emphasize the Native American perspective. In The Soul of the Indian, he shares the customs, rituals, celebrations, and beliefs of Native American spirituality, and in so doing provides a powerful account of the “Great Mystery” at their core.

The Olmec people are widely recognized as the first major civilization of Mexico and are thus generally regarded as the mother civilization of Mesoamerica, making them the people from which all subsequent Mesoamerican cultures derived. By and large, the Olmec culture is perhaps best identifiable by their so-called colossal heads, mammoth basalt head-statues wearing helmet-like headdresses found throughout Olmec habitation sites.

Before my family lived in this house, a different family did, and before them, another family, and another before them. And before that, the family lived here, not in a house, but a wigwam. Who lived where you are before you got there? This Land teaches listeners that American land, from our backyards to our schools to Disney World, are the traditional homelands of many Indigenous nations. This Land will spark curiosity and encourage readers to explore the history of the places they live and the people who have lived there throughout time and today.

History is dramatic - and the renowned, award-winning authors Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier demonstrate this in this compelling series aimed at young listeners. Covering American history from the founding of Jamestown through the present day, these volumes explore far beyond the dates and events of a historical chronicle to present a moving illumination of the ideas, opinions, attitudes and tribulations that led to the birth of this great nation.

When European settlers - and later American settlers - came into contact with Native American tribes on the continent, they were frequently unable to differentiate between the subcultures within individual tribes. This led to all kinds of misunderstandings. When the Spanish came into contact with different tribes in the Southwest, they categorized several of them as Pueblo. Thus, while most Americans have heard of the Pueblo and Navajo, many remain unfamiliar with distinctions within the tribes.

As the armed conflicts between the English colonies in North America and the French settlements raged in the 1700s, a young Puritan girl, Eunice Williams, is kidnapped by Mohawk people and taken to Canada. She is adopted into a new family, a new culture, and a new set of traditions that will define her life. As Eunice spends her days learning the Mohawk language and the roles of women and girls in the community, she gains a deeper understanding of her Mohawk family.

The Toltec are one of the most famous Mesoamerican groups in South America, but they are also the most controversial and mysterious. The Toltec have been identified as the group that established a strong state centered in Tula (in present-day Mexico), and the Aztec claimed the Toltec as their cultural predecessors, so much so that the word Toltec comes from the Aztec's word Tōltēcatl, translated as artisan.

In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, historian Peter C. Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a natural world undergoing rapid change in the century following the historic voyages of Christopher Columbus. Through innovative use of oral history and folklore maintained for centuries by Native Americans as well as original use of manuscript atlases, paintings that depict European representations of nature, and texts that circulated across the ocean, he reveals how the encounter between the old world and the new changed the fate of millions.

In the 15th century, four Mahu sail from Tahiti to Hawaii and share their gifts of science and healing with the people of Waikiki. The islanders return this gift with a monument of four boulders in their honor, which the Mahu imbue with healing powers before disappearing. As time passes, foreigners inhabit the island and the once-sacred stones are forgotten until the 1960s. Though the true story of these stones was not fully recovered, the power of the Mahu still calls out to those who pass by them at Waikiki Beach today.

This audiobook examines some of the ways in which, beginning very early in their interactions with European-Americans, the Cherokee began to adopt white culture and make it their own. They modeled much of their way of life on the way of life of their white neighbors, so much so that many of them sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Award-winning author Duncan Tonatiuh reimagines one of Mexico's cherished legends. Princess Izta had many wealthy suitors but dismissed them all. When a mere warrior, Popoca, promised to be true to her and stay always by her side, Izta fell in love. The emperor promised Popoca if he could defeat their enemy Jaguar Claw, then Popoca and Izta could wed.

Quando si pensa alle antiche civiltà del continente americano, come quella maya o azteca, si è soliti associarle a immagini di piramidi immerse nella foresta; difficilmente si pensa a come si nutrivano. Se in genere si fatica a riconoscere l’origine americana di molti cibi della nostra tavola, come patate, mais e pomodori, ancor più difficilmente si associano questi cibi alle loro originarie forme di preparazione e alle antiche culture alimentari di cui fecero parte.

The Inca Empire, which flourished in modern day Peru and along the west coast of South America, was the largest Native American empire in pre-Columbian America until Pizarro and the Spanish conquistadors conquered them in the 16th century. What ultimately sealed their doom was the rumor that huge amounts of gold were available in regions south of the Andes Mountains.