Native American Science

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.

The use of hallucinogenic substances like peyote and desert tobacco has long played a significant role in the spiritual practices and traditions of Native Americans. While the majority of those practices are well documented, the relationship between entheogens and Native Americans of the Southeast has gone largely unexplored.

Hidden in the mountains, the indigenous peoples of Mexico have kept alive the spiritual path of the ancient Toltecs, one of the most powerful Mesoamerican spiritual traditions alive today. Tracing their lineage to a time before the Aztec, the Toltecs recognize Earth as a living being, share a profound communion with their land, and demonstrate unusual powers of perception.

In this book, Frid tackles the big questions: Who, or what, represents our essential selves, and what stories might allow us to shift the collective psyche of industrial civilization in time to avert the worst of the climate and biodiversity crises? In seeking the answers, he draws from a deep well of personal experience and that of indigenous colleagues, finding a glimmer of hope in indigenous cultures that, despite the ravishes of colonialism, have for thousands of years developed intentional and socially complex practices for resource management that epitomize sustainability.

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.

Often overlooked, there is mixed blood at the heart of America. And at the heart of Native life for centuries there were complex households using intermarriage to link disparate communities and create protective circles of kin. Beginning in the 17th century, Native peoples - Ojibwes, Otoes, Cheyennes, Chinooks, and others - formed new families with young French, English, Canadian, and American fur traders who spent months in smoky winter lodges or at boisterous summer rendezvous.

Long before state health care or food stamps, before the creation of welfare ghettoes in our major cities, America’s first experiment with socialism and government dependency practically destroyed the American Indian. Government experts created the Indian reservations. America’s churches whole-heartedly supported it, convinced the reservation would be the key to winning souls for Christianity.

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).

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.

In this enlightening book, scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history that have misinformed generations. Tracing how these ideas evolved, and drawing from history, the authors disrupt long-held and enduring myths.

When Danielle Geller’s mother dies of alcohol withdrawal during an attempt to get sober, Geller returns to Florida and finds her mother’s life packed into eight suitcases. Most were filled with clothes, except for the last one, which contained diaries, photos, and letters, a few undeveloped disposable cameras, dried sage, jewelry, and the bandana her mother wore on days she skipped a hair wash. Geller, an archivist and a writer, uses these pieces of her mother’s life to try and understand her mother’s relationship to home, and their shared need to leave it.

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.

Navajo myths are among the most poetic in the world, full of dazzling word imagery. For the Navajo, who call themselves the Dine (literally, "the People"), the story of emergence—their creation myth—lies at the heart of their beliefs. In it, all the world is created together, both gods and human beings, embodying the idea that change comes from within rather than without. Poet and author Gerald Hausman collects this and other stories with meditations that together capture the essence of the Navajo people's way of life and their understanding of the world.

In Cherokee myth - as in other indigenous American traditions - the whole of creation is alive and able to communicate like humans and with the human beings who share their environment. Cherokee myths explain how the world came to be the way it is and imparts important lessons about Cherokee cultural values.

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 beautifully reimagined story by NSK Neustadt Laureate and New York Times best-selling author Cynthia Leitich Smith (Muscogee Creek), Native American Lily and English Wendy embark on a high-flying journey of magic, adventure, and courage to a fairy-tale island known as Neverland....

Celebrated novelist David Treuer has gained a reputation for writing fiction that expands the horizons of Native American literature. In Rez Life, his first full-length work of nonfiction, Treuer brings a novelist's storytelling skill and an eye for detail to a complex and subtle examination of Native American reservation life, past and present. With authoritative research and reportage, Treuer illuminates misunderstood contemporary issues of sovereignty, treaty rights, and natural-resource conservation.

Against the backdrop of a never-colonized North America, a broken Ojibwe detective embarks on an emotional and twisting journey toward solving two murders, rediscovering family, and finding himself.

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.