Native American Science

Purely by chance, renowned author Mary Summer Rain met No-Eyes, a blind Chippewa visionary who lives in a small, remote cabin in the Colorado mountains. Spirit Song the first volume in Summer Rain's No-Eyes tetralogy, introduces us to this remarkable, unforgettable woman. No-Eyes teaches her about many fascinating topics, including the history of the Chippewa people, the songs of the shaman, and the healing power of medicinal herbs.

What have you always wanted to know about Indians? Do you think you should already know the answers-or suspect that your questions may be offensive? In matter-of-fact responses to over 120 questions, both thoughtful and outrageous, modern and historical, Ojibwe scholar and cultural preservationist Anton Treuer gives a frank, funny, and sometimes personal tour of what's up with Indians, anyway.

Baffled by the stereotypes presented by Hollywood and much historical fiction, many other Americans find the contemporary American Indian an enigma. Compounding their confusion is the highly publicized struggle of the contemporary Indian for self-determination, lost land, cultural preservation, and fundamental human rights - a struggle dramatized both by public acts of protest and by precedent-setting legal actions. American Indians, American Justice explores the complexities of the present Indian situation, particularly with regard to legal and political rights.

A sixth-generation North Carolinian, highly-acclaimed author John Ehle grew up on former Cherokee hunting grounds. His experience as an accomplished novelist, combined with his extensive, meticulous research, culminates in this moving tragedy rich with historical detail.

In a society where raging narcissism dominates the moral landscape, the virtue of humility is often dismissed as irrelevant. Not only is humility vanishing from contemporary culture, but we are also witnessing how destructive a lack of humility has become among our churches and ministry leaders. And yet, Richard Foster, the founder of Renovare, insists that humility is central to the journey toward character formation and spiritual transformation. For this reason he decided to spend a year studying the virtue of humility.

In Voices from Hudson Bay Cree elders recall the daily lives and experiences of the men and women who lived and worked at the Hudson’s Bay Company post at York Factory in Manitoba. Their stories, their memories of family, community, and daily life, define their past and provide insights into a way of life that has largely disappeared in northern Canada. The era the elders describe, from the end of World War I to the closing of York Factory in 1957, saw dramatic changes—both positive and negative—to Indigenous life in the North.

In Plant Teachers, Narby and Pizuri hold a cross-cultural dialogue that explores the similarities between ayahuasca and tobacco, the role of these plants in indigenous cultures, and the hidden truths they reveal about nature. Juxtaposing two distinct worldviews, Plant Teachers invites listeners on a wide-ranging journey through anthropology, botany, and biochemistry, while raising tantalizing questions about the relationship between science and other ways of knowing.

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.

On a hot June morning in 1975, a fatal shoot-out took place between FBI agents and American Indians on a remote property near Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in which an Indian and two federal agents were killed. Eventually, four members of the American Indian Movement were indicted on murder charges in the deaths of the two agents. Behind this violent chain of events lie issues of great complexity and profound historical resonance, brilliantly explicated by Peter Matthiessen in this controversial book.

This thoughtful, in-depth account of Native struggles against environmental and cultural degradation features chapters on the Seminoles, the Anishinaabeg, the Innu, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Mohawks, among others. Filled with inspiring testimonies of struggles for survival, each page of this volume speaks forcefully for self-determination and community.

At the end of the American Revolution, Britain and the United States imagined a future for each of their nations that stretched across a continent. They signed treaties with one another dividing lands neither country could map, much less control. A century and a half later, Canada and the United States had largely fulfilled those earlier ambitions. Both countries had built nations that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and had made an expansive international border that restricted movement.

A definitive history of mescaline that explores its mind-altering effects across cultures, from ancient America to Western modernity. Mescaline became a popular sensation in the mid-20th century through Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, after which the word "psychedelic" was coined to describe it. Its story, however, extends deep into prehistory: The earliest Andean cultures depicted mescaline-containing cacti in their temples.

Mary Brave Bird grew up fatherless in a one-room cabin, without running water or electricity, on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Rebelling against the aimless drinking, punishing missionary school, narrow strictures for women, and violence and hopeless of reservation life, she joined the new movement of tribal pride sweeping Native American communities in the '60s and '70s.

Unapologetically punk, the essays in Thunder Song segue from the miraculous to the mundane, from the spiritual to the physical, as they examine the role of art—in particular music—and community in helping a new generation of indigenous people claim the strength of their heritage while defining their own path in the contemporary world.

Drawing on archeological and ethno-historical evidence, Irving Rouse sketches a picture of the Tainos-the first people Columbus encountered when he arrived in the Americas-as they existed during the time of Columbus, contrasting their customs with those of their neighbors. He then moves backward in time to the ancestors of the Tainos-two successive groups who settled the West Indies and who are known to archeologists as the Saladoid peoples and the Ostionoid peoples.

After a security guard is found dead and another wounded at the Children's Museum of Science and History in Norman, Oklahoma, Detective Monique Blue Hawk and her partner Chris Pierson are summoned to investigate. They find no fingerprints, no footprints, and no obvious means to enter the locked building.

Professor Timothy R. Pauketat illuminates the riveting discovery of the largest pre-Columbian city on U.S. soil. Once a flourishing metropolis of 20,000 people in 1050, Cahokia had rotted away by 1400. Its earthen mounds near modern-day St. Louis reveal “woodhenges” and evidence of large-scale human sacrifice.

Drawing on archaeology, historical evidence, oral traditions, and linguistics, this audiobook provides a view of Iroquois life from the prehistoric period and Owasco sites through the establishment of the Five Nations/

Below the mist-shrouded mountains of the West Coast lie the stories of how we came to be. It is through the myths of the people who have lived with this spirit of place for thousands of years that we uncover the mystery of our homeland. The mythical creatures Raven, Thunderbird, Bear, and the Great Spirit become a path to rediscovering the spiritual landscape of culture. These are the stories of the Pacific Coast that tell of gods and demons, good and evil; things unimaginable brought to life.

In the autumn of 1878, a band of Cheyenne Indians set out from Indian Territory, where they had been sent by the US government, to return to their homeland in Yellowstone country. Mari Sandoz tells the saga of their heartbreaking fifteen-hundred-mile flight.