Native American Science

Drawing on encounters between the Creeks of the Southeast and the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century, Savage Systers reveals a world in which Native women wielded power through means that shocked European observers: ritualized torture, scalp dances, brutal initiation rites, even infanticide and cannibalism. Far from aberrations, these acts embodied forms of feminine authority rooted deep in tribal culture. In deciding whether a captive lived or died, whether a stranger was rejected or absorbed, Native women determined the fate of peoples and nations.

Balancing loyalties and desires isn’t easy, but Jinx Whitethorn is determined to try. She finally understands what she is and the secrets that bind her fate, but she still has questions. Jinx turns to the only living relative she has left on her father’s side. It goes against every tribe fable Kaya Whitethorn had been told as a child, but she agrees to help her skinwalker niece.

One of the last migratory American Indian tribes, the Tihanama people of Tennessee ranged from the Great Lakes to the Florida Panhandle. Other Southeastern peoples called them the Big Medicine tribe. They were known for their legends, antiquity, trail markings, knowledge of herbs, funeral ceremonies, songs, paints, and dyes. This collection by Donald Panther-Yates is as unique as its subject - there is no other like it. The Eighth Arrow story will completely alter your understanding of Native American spirituality. It may change your life.

This book restores a little-known advocate of Indian rights to her place in history. In June 1889 a widowed Brooklyn artist named Catherine Weldon traveled to the Standing Rock Reservation in Dakota Territory to help Sitting Bull hold on to land that the government was trying to wrest from his people. Her efforts were counterproductive; she was ordered to leave the reservation, and the Standing Rock Sioux were bullied into signing away their land. But she returned with her teenage son, settling at Sitting Bull's camp on the Grand River.

In American Indians and the American Dream, Kasey R. Keeler examines the long history of urbanization and suburbanization of Indian communities in Minnesota.

This one-volume narrative history of American Indians in the United States traces the experiences of indigenous peoples from early colonial times to the present day. It demonstrates how Indian existence has varied and changed throughout our nation's history. Although popular opinion and standard histories often depict tribal peoples as victims of US aggression, that is only a part of their story. In this book Roger L. Nichols focuses on the ideas, beliefs, and actions of American Indian individuals and tribes.

A string of gruesome deaths in the Shiprock area has attracted the attention of FBI agent Diane Lopez. The killer is unmistakably a vampire - but the only vampire Diane knows of is State Police officer Lee Nez. One of the good guys. The victims worked for a secret government lab that was studying a captured vampire, Stewart Tanner. Driven mad, Tanner broke free and took revenge on his tormenters. Now he’s threatening to kill a powerful judge unless the feds promise to leave him alone.

Eagle Blue follows the Fort Yukon Eagles, winners of six regional championships in a row, through the course of an entire 28-game season, from their first day of practice in late November to the Alaska State Championship Tournament in March. With insight, frankness, and compassion, Michael D’Orso climbs into the lives of these 14 boys, their families, and their coach, shadowing them through an Arctic winter of 50-below-zero temperatures and near-round-the-clock darkness as the Eagles crisscross Alaska in pursuit of their - and their village’s - dream.

Taken from George Armstrong Custer's own writings, An Autobiography of General Custer is the “true story” of one of the most praised, most despised, but surely most remembered American military heroes. Indeed, few figures in our history were - in their own time, as well as in our own - so wildly cheered and so roundly hated.

Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to help them recover their looted heritage from museums across the country. As senior curator of anthropology, Chip Colwell navigated firsthand the questions of how to weigh the religious freedom of Native Americans against the academic freedom of scientists and whether the emptying of museum shelves elevates human rights or destroys a common heritage. His book reveals a dramatic process that involves negotiating the blurry lines between identity and morality, spirituality and politics.

Colin Calloway uses the prism of George Washington's life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America's founding. The Indian World of George Washington spans decades of Native American leaders' interactions with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands to his military career against both the French and the British to his presidency.

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.

At the height of the Great Depression, Sam Babb, the charismatic basketball coach of tiny Oklahoma Presbyterian College, began dreaming. Like so many others, he wanted a reason to have hope. Traveling from farm to farm, he recruited talented, hardworking young women and offered them a chance at a better life: a free college education if they would come play for his basketball team, the Cardinals. Despite their fears of leaving home and the sacrifices faced by their families, the women followed Babb and his dream.

Through much of the 20th century, federal policy toward Indians sought to extinguish all remnants of native life and culture. That policy was dramatically confronted in the late 1960s when a loose coalition of hippies, civil rights advocates, Black Panthers, unions, Mexican-Americans, Quakers and other Christians, celebrities, and others joined with Red Power activists to fight for Indian rights. In Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power, Sherry Smith offers the first full account of this remarkable story.

Charles Eastman is unique among Indian writers, whether storytellers or oral historians. He was raised traditionally, as a Woodland Sioux, by his grandmother, from 1858 to 1874, until he was 15. He thus gained a thorough first-hand knowledge of the lifeways, language, culture, and oral history. His father (thought to have been hanged at Mankato, Minnesota) reappeared and insisted he receive the white man's education.

When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again - this time from a war close to home, and to his own heart.

Invisible No More is a collection of stories by Native American leaders, many of them women, who are leading the way through cultural grounding and nation-building in the areas of community, environmental justice, and economic justice. Authors in the collection come from over a dozen Native nations. While telling their stories, authors excavate the history and ongoing effects of genocide and colonialism. At the same time, the authors detail ways that listeners might imagine the world differently, presenting stories of Native community building that offer benefits for all.

Sins of the Shovel is a story of adventure and business gone wrong and how archaeologists today grapple with this complex heritage. Through the story of the Hyde Exploring Expedition, practicing archaeologist Rachel Morgan uncovers the uncomfortable links between commodity culture, contemporary ethics, and the broader political forces that perpetuate destructive behavior today. The result is an unsparing and even-handed assessment of American archaeology's sins, past and present, and how the field is working toward atonement.

The book reveals the universal and cosmic love of the Red Road. The Red Road is the philosophy/worldview/religion of the native Indian tribes/pueblos of North and South America. This worldview promotes integration with Mother Earth and the cosmos to achieve harmony within eternally evolving existence. Using the Chicano as an example, the book explores the human lifetime as a cosmic being with eternal cycles of reincarnation and integration. This cosmic journey is examined from the perspective of the Red Road.

The revolutionary Ohio Valley is often depicted as a chaotic Hobbesian dystopia, in which Indians and colonists slaughtered each other at every turn. In Unsettling the West, Rob Harper overturns this familiar story. Rather than flailing in a morass, the peoples of the revolutionary Ohio Valley actively and persistently sought to establish a new political order that would affirm their land claims, protect them against attack, and promote trade.