Native American Politics

A note is left on a car windshield, an old dog dies, and Kent Nerburn finds himself back on the Lakota reservation where he traveled more than a decade before with a tribal elder named Dan. The touching, funny, and haunting journey that ensues goes deep into reservation boarding-school mysteries, the dark confines of sweat lodges, and isolated Native homesteads far back in the Dakota hills in search of ghosts that have haunted Dan since childhood.

On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche received her medical degree - becoming the first Native American doctor in US history. She earned her degree 31 years before women could vote and 35 years before Indians could become citizens in their own country. This is the story of an Indian woman who effectively became the chief of an entrenched patriarchal tribe, the story of a woman who crashed through thick walls of ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice and then spent the rest of her life using a unique bicultural identity to improve the lot of her people.

What is truth in the eyes of Native Americans? What does it mean to be Indian? Do American Indians have a sense of humor? How does their religion differ from other spiritualities? Listen to what Tecumseh, Red Jacket and other chiefs have to say, as well as contemporary elders like Two White Feathers and Donald Panther-Yates. Enjoy the humor of American Indian Movement leaders like Russell Means and Dennis Banks in this miscellany published on the anniversary of a groundbreaking website from the 90s. You will never think of American Indian writers and activists the same way.

One of the most definitive accounts of the training and work of a Pipe Carrier, I Send a Voice is a gripping first-person account inside a Native American sweat lodge ceremony. Evelyn Eaton writes of her resolve to become worthy of participating in this healing ritual as she embraces the whole length of "the hero's journey." Through tests and ordeals inside and outside of the lodge while following the shamanic spiritual path, she arrives at her ultimate request—a healing pipe of her own.

In the second half of the 19th century, the Euro-American citizenry of California carried out mass genocide against the Native population of their state, using the processes and mechanisms of democracy to secure land and resources for themselves and their private interests. The murder, rape, and enslavement of thousands of Native people were legitimized by notions of democracy - in this case mob rule.

Recent archaeological findings, newly discovered written accounts, and never-before-published records have contributed to a whole new understanding of our country's oldest ancestors. Drawing upon the latest research, as well as his own personal experience living among the Hopi tribes, acclaimed author and former Natural History magazine editor Jake Page covers all aspects of Indian life throughout the ages.

The autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak (Black Hawk’s birth name), first published in 1833, is the autobiography of the Native American Sauk leader Black Hawk. During his time in custody following clashes with European-American settlers on ceded tribal land, Black Hawk told his story to an interpreter and journalist. This story, what would become Life of Black Hawk, went on to become the first Native American autobiography and an instant best seller. Black Hawk not only traces his own history, but that of his people, and much more.

Native America presents an infinitely surprising and fascinating deep history of the continent's Indigenous peoples. Kenneth Feder, a leading expert on Native American history and archaeology, draws on archaeological, historical, and cultural evidence to tell the ongoing story, more than 20,000 years in the making, of an incredibly resilient and diverse mixture of peoples, revealing how they have ingeniously adapted to the many changing environments of the continent, from the Arctic to the desert Southwest.

From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes' removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory. The tribes marginalized free black people in the Indian nations well after the Civil War and slavery had ended. In this groundbreaking study, Barbara Krauthamer rewrites the history of southern slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native American slaveholders and the black people they enslaved.

This carefully researched exploration of Native American culture investigates the complex, often misunderstood histories of hundreds of indigenous peoples. Author James Wilson has drawn from ethnographic and archaeological studies, historical texts, and the rich written and oral traditions of Native Americans to complete this important work.

I made this book from the data I collected. All around me when I was young healthy-looking people older than me with native American characteristics were losing limbs because of the "Sugar disease". I mentally noted it but only paid it attention one night after work I ate a lot of fruit... I mean a lot. That night I ran to the bathroom multiple times and experienced extreme thirst. So I drank everything in the fridge that morning before work (Orange Juice, Milk, etc).

In the heart of Indian country in the American west, clandestine criminals were profiting greatly from the sale of sacred Native American artifacts stolen from tribal lands. These artifacts were so ancient they had been used since the migration of the first Americans into North America some 15,000 years ago. In the year 1998, the illegal trafficking of these artifacts peaked in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

At the turn of the 19th century, one mile east of Grand Marais, Minnesota, you would have found Chippewa City, a village that as many as 200 Anishinaabe families called home. Today you will find only Highway 61, private lakeshore property, and the one remaining village building: St. Francis Xavier Church. In Walking the Old Road, Staci Lola Drouillard guides listeners through the story of that lost community, reclaiming for history the Ojibwe voices that have for so long, and so unceremoniously, been silenced.

Since its publication in 1932, Black Elk Speaks has moved countless readers to appreciate the American Indian world that it described. John Neihardt’s popular narrative addressed the youth and early adulthood of Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux religious elder. Michael F. Steltenkamp now provides the first full interpretive biography of Black Elk, distilling in one volume what is known of this American Indian wisdom keeper whose life has helped guide others. Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Missionary, Mystic shows that the holy-man was not the dispirited traditionalist commonly depicted in literature....

From a hunting and gathering lifestyle to first contact with Europeans to land dispossession to claims cases, and much more, Wishart takes a wide-angle look at one of the most significant groups of people in the country. Myriad internal and external forces have profoundly shaped Indian lives on the Great Plains.

A controversial figure in his day, Black Hawk was the leader of the Sauk American Indian tribe in the early 1800s. The son of the tribe’s medicine man, Black Hawk’s exploits as a warrior aided his rise to the status of tribal war leader. Here, Black Hawk chronicles his life as well as the story of his tribe, who were forced from their lands in Illinois during a series of skirmishes with American settlers in what came to be known as the Black Hawk War.

On a winter morning in 1990, Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota picked up the Bismarck Tribune. On the front page, a small girl gazed into the distance, shedding a tear. The headline: Foster home children beaten - and nobody's helping. Dorgan, who had been working with American Indian tribes to secure resources, was distressed. He flew to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation to meet with five-year-old Tamara and her grandfather. They became friends. Then she disappeared. And he would search for her for decades until they finally found each other again.

In this accessible and innovative work, Susan Burch tells the story of the Indigenous people - families, communities, and nations, across generations to the present day - who have experienced the impact of this history. Drawing on oral history interviews, correspondence, material objects, and archival sources, Burch reframes the histories of institutionalized people and the places that held them. Committed expands the boundaries of Native American history, disability studies, and US social and cultural history generally.

When Europeans first arrived in North America, between five and eight million Indigenous people were already living there. But how did they come to be here? What were their agricultural, spiritual, and hunting practices? How did their societies evolve, and what challenges do they face today? Eminent historians Theda Perdue and Michael Green begin by describing how nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers followed the bison and woolly mammoth over the Bering land mass between Asia and what is now Alaska between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago, settling throughout North America.

This story has its beginnings on a day long ago when Earth rolled and heaved, and rocks fell like rain... Thus began what some today would call a “migration” of The Walking People. Leaderless and bereft of the shared knowledge of tradition, they set off on their journey. Their story is the story of how one particular group of human beings was able to start anew - to learn through difficulty and changing circumstance to prosper as a Whole People.