Indigenous Voices

Between 1989 and 2001, Indian Country saw enormous changes in treaty rights, casino gambling, language renewal, and tribal sovereignty. Jim Northrup, a thoroughly modern traditional Ojibwe man who writes a monthly syndicated newspaper column, the Fond du Lac Follies, witnessed it all. Jim Northrup is an award-winning journalist, poet, and playwright and author. Margaret Noori is the director of the Comprehensive Studies program and a lecturer in the Native American Studies program at the University of Michigan.

Oral history is a widespread and well-developed research method in many fields--but the conduct of oral histories of and by American Indian peoples has unique issues and concerns that are too rarely addressed. This essential guide begins by differentiating between the practice of oral history and the ancient oral traditions of Indian cultures, detailing ethical and legal parameters, and addressing the different motivations for and uses of oral histories in tribal, community, and academic settings. Within that crucial context, the authors provide a practical, step-by-step guide to project planning.

Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity?

Elements of Indigenous Style offers Indigenous writers and editors—and everyone creating works about Indigenous Peoples—the first published guide to common questions and issues of style and process.

A paradigm-shifting book in the vein of Sapiens that brings a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability--and offers a new template for living. As an indigenous person, Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural and spiritual world. In considering how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, he raises important questions. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?

This book poses questions about what community is, how to reclaim community, and how to embark on the process of envisioning what and where the community can be. Geographer Laura Harjo demonstrates that Mvskoke communities have what they need to dream, imagine, speculate, and activate the wishes of ancestors, contemporary kin, and future relatives--all in a present temporality--­which is Indigenous futurity. Organized around four methodologies--radical sovereignty, community knowledge, collective power, and emergence geographies--Spiral to the Stars provides a path that departs from traditional community-making strategies, which are often extensions of the settler state. Readers are provided a set of methodologies to build genuine community relationships, knowledge, power, and spaces for themselves.

This book brings to the public for the first time the complete writings of the first known American Indian literary writer, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (her English name) or Bamewawagezhikaquay (her Ojibwe name), Woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky (1800-1842). Beginning as early as 1815, Schoolcraft wrote poems and traditional stories while also translating songs and other Ojibwe texts into English. The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky presents a collection of all Schoolcraft's extant writings along with a cultural and biographical history.

In 1830, a treaty was signed. In 1830, hearts broke. Tears fell on the long journey for twenty thousand. The Choctaw Nation was forced to leave their homelands to preserve their people. But they could not save them all. For this collection of short stories, Choctaw authors from five U.S. states come together to present a part of their ancestors' journey, a way to honor those who walked the trail for their future. These stories not only capture a history and a culture, but the spirit, faith, and resilience of the Choctaw people.

From the moment European settlers reached these shores, the American apocalypse began. But Native Americans did not vanish. How did Indigenous communities achieve the miracle of their own survival and live to tell the tale? What strategies did America's Indigenous people rely on that may help us to endure an apocalypse--or perhaps even prevent one from happening? Charleston points to four Indigenous prophets who helped their people learn strategies for surviving catastrophe: Ganiodaiio of the Seneca, Tenskwatawa of the Shawnee, Smohalla of the Wanapams, and Wovoka of the Paiute.

Author Roberta Capasso explores the way generations of Native American children were forcibly taken from their families and subjected to the federal government’s Indian boarding school experiment in order to assimilate them. As a direct descendant of a woman victimized by this experiment, the author tells with raw emotion and diligent archival research the story of the historical and emotional bonds between her deceased relatives and herself. Like a detective cracking a murder mystery, discrepancies between the Carlisle Indian School’s accounts and a great-grandmother’s real life story are exposed, with fascinating and fortuitous twists and turns along the way.

This first collection, in prose memoir and poetry, of the work of a Navajo poet and teacher describes attending a government school for Indian children and the challenge it presented to her socially, culturally, and expressively. Laura Tohe says this of her experience: "I was born in Fort Defiance, Arizona, and raised on the Diné (Navajo) Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico. I grew up speaking Diné as my primary language."

The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America. Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian Kyle T. Mays argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in antiblackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present. He explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled for freedom, sometimes together, and sometimes apart.

In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others. Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction.

Written by and for nurses, this is the first text to focus exclusively on American Indian health and nursing. It addresses the profound disparities in policy, health care law, and health outcomes that affect American Indians, and describes how these disparities, bound into the cultural, environmental, historical, and geopolitical fabric of American Indian society, are responsible for the marked lack of wellbeing of American Indians. American Indian nurse authors, natives of nine unique American Indian cultures, address the four domains of health: physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional.

Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary'Lammy'Award in LGBTQ StudiesThe first book to examine the correlation between mixed-race identity and HIV/AIDS among Native American gay men and transgendered people, Indian Blood provides an analysis of the emerging and often contested LGBTQ'two-spirit'identification as it relates to public health and mixed-race identity.

In 2007 the United Nations approved the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. United States endorsement in 2010 ushered in a new era of Indian law and policy. This book highlights steps that the United States, as well as other nations, must take to provide a more just society and heal past injustices committed against indigenous peoples.

This important book breaks new ground by asking how oral histories might be incorporated into the existing court system. Through compelling analysis of Aboriginal, legal, and anthropological concepts of fact and evidence, Oral History on Trial traces the long trajectory of oral history from community to court, and offers a sophisticated critique of the Crown's use of Aboriginal materials in key cases.

The study of American Indian law and policy usually focuses on federal statutes and court decisions, with these sources forming the basis for most textbooks. Virtually ignored is the robust and growing body of scholarly literature analyzing and contextualizing these primary sources. Reading American Indian Law is designed to fill that void. Organized into four parts, this book presents 16 of the most impactful law review articles written during the last three decades.

This specialized resource is well organized and clear, and will help students comprehend the tough and often impossible position that American Indians have faced when dealing with the U.S. and Canadian governments. It presents an objective view of how those governments used unfair treaties and deceitful treaty-making procedures to their advantage. The one- to two-page entries, some accompanied by black-and-white photographs or drawings, also explain how current tribal governments use the agreements to require federal governments to honor Indian rights. Related court cases and legislative activity are included.

The number of American Indian and Alaska Native owned businesses increased by 15.3 percent from 2007 to 2012, a time when the total number of US businesses increased by just 2 percent. Despite this impressive growth, there is an absence of small businesses on reservations, and Native Americans own private businesses at the lowest rate per capita for any ethnic or racial group in the United States. This book provides an accessible introduction to American Indian businesses, business practices, and business education.

Leslie Marmon Silko's groundbreaking book Storyteller, first published in 1981, blends original short stories and poetry influenced by the traditional oral tales that she heard growing up on the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico with autobiographical passages, folktales, family memories, and photographs. As she mixes traditional and Western literary genres, Silko examines themes of memory, alienation, power, and identity; communicates Native American notions regarding time, nature, and spirituality; and explores how stories and storytelling shape people and communities.

Through an eclectic assortment of media, including personal essays, interviews, and newspaper columns, Harjo reflects upon the nuances and development of her art, the importance of her origins, and the arduous reconstructions of the tribal past, as well as the dramatic confrontation between Native American and Anglo civilizations. Harjo takes us on a journey into her identity as a woman and an artist, poised between poetry and music, encompassing tribal heritage and comparisons with the American cultural patrimony.

Lakota Woman was a national best seller and winner of the American Book Award. It is a unique document, unparalleled in American Indian literature, a story of death, of determination against all odds, of the cruelties perpetuated against American Indians, and of the Native American struggle for rights. Working with Richard Erdoes, one of the 20th century's leading writers on Native American affairs, Brave Bird recounts her difficult upbringing and the path of her fascinating life.

Of Athapaskan and Tlingit ancestry, Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned lived in the southern Yukon Territory for nearly a century. They collaborated with Julie Cruikshank, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, to produce this unique kind of autobiography.

After historical overviews of the early years of Native American and, specifically, Navajo ethnography, the greater part of the volume introduces a method that enables the reading of editorially reorganized ethnographic texts as a means of accessing and listening to informants' rich stories. The volume concludes with an introduction of ethnographic work in Navajo country that has been distinguished for its reliability, accuracy, and authenticity. These collections were primarily initiated from within the tribal community and produced through collaborative relationships.

A riveting new biography of America's greatest all-around athlete. Jim Thorpe rose to world fame as a mythic talent who excelled at every sport. He won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, was an All-American football player at the Carlisle Indian School, the star of the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and played major league baseball for John McGraw's New York Giants. As a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, he encountered duplicitous authorities who turned away from him when their reputations were at risk. At Carlisle, he dealt with the racist assimilationist philosophy "Kill the Indian, Save the Man."

In this remarkable collection of 52 oral histories, first published in 1971, members of Dakota, Lakota, Winnebago, Crow, and other communities tell of their personal experiences: reservation life, the Great Depression of the 1930s, self-government, traditions, and life in the 1960s. Together these voices present a rich and complicated view of what it is to be an American Indian.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers and that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.

The second edition incorporates new literature along with substantial updates, including a thorough discussion of Indigenous theory and analysis, new chapters on community partnership and capacity building, an added focus on oracy and other forms of knowledge dissemination, and a renewed call to decolonize the academy. The second edition also includes discussion questions to enhance classroom interaction with the text. In a field that continues to grow and evolve, and as universities and researchers strive to learn and apply Indigenous-informed research, this important new edition introduces readers to the principles and practices of Indigenous methodologies.

Indigenous researchers are knowledge seekers who work to progress Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing in a modern and constantly evolving context. This book describes a research paradigm shared by Indigenous scholars in Canada and Australia, and demonstrates how this paradigm can be put into practice. Indigenous researchers develop relationships with ideas in order to achieve enlightenment in the ceremony that is Indigenous research. For researchers to be accountable to all our relations, we must make careful choices in our selection of topics, methods of data collection, forms of analysis and finally in the way we present information.

Indigenous leaders and other visionaries suggest solutions to today's global crisis Original Instructions are ancient ways of living from the heart of humanity within the heart of nature. Explores the convergence of indigenous and contemporary science and the re-indigenization of the world's peoples Original Instructions evokes the rich indigenous storytelling tradition in this collection of presentations gathered from the annual Bioneers conference. Included are more than 20 contemporary indigenous leaders--such as Chief Oren Lyons, John Mohawk, Winona LaDuke, and John Trudell.

The received idea of Native American history -- as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's 1970 mega-bestselling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee -- has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and novels, David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative. Because of their intense struggles to preserve their language, their traditions, their families, and their very existence -- the story of American Indians since the end of the nineteenth century to the present is one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is the intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.

Two profoundly moving, candid histories and a powerful novel illuminate important aspects of the Native American story. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee The #1 New York Times bestseller that awakened the world to the destruction of American Indians in the nineteenth-century West, The Fetterman Massacre A riveting account of events leading up to the Battle of the Hundred Slain--the devastating 1866 conflict at Wyoming's Ft. Phil Kearney that pitted Lakota, Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne warriors--including Oglala chief Red Cloud, against the United States cavalry, Creek Mary's Blood This New York Times bestseller fictionalizes the true story of Mary Musgrove--born in 1700 to a Creek tribal chief--and five generations of her family. The sweeping narrative spans the Revolutionary War, the Trail of Tears, and the Civil War--in which Mary's descendants fought on both sides of the conflict.

Fierce, angry, funny, groundbreaking--Tommy Orange's first novel is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. There There is a multi-generational, relentlessly paced story about violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people.

The eagerly awaited follow-up to Pulitzer Prize finalist Tommy Orange's breakout best seller There There, Wandering Stars traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Redfeather's shooting in There There. Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage--a masterful follow-up to his already--classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America's war on its own people.

An American classic, House Made of Dawn is at once a tragic tale about the disabling effects of war and cultural separation, and a hopeful story of a stranger in his native land, finding his way back to all that is familiar and sacred.

Tracks is a tale of passion and deep unrest. Over the course of ten crucial years, as tribal land and trust between people erode ceaselessly, men and women are pushed to the brink of their endurance—yet their pride and humor prohibit surrender.

Historian William Bauer seeks to correct that oversight through an innovative approach that tells California history strictly through Native perspectives. Using oral histories of Concow, Pomo, and Paiute workers, taken as part of a New Deal federal works project, Bauer reveals how Native peoples have experienced and interpreted the history of the land we now call California.

Philip Deloria explores this cultural discordance to show how stereotypes and Indian experiences have competed for ascendancy in the wake of the military conquest of Native America and the nation's subsequent embrace of Native "authenticity." Rewriting the story of the national encounter with modernity, Deloria provides revealing accounts of Indians doing unexpected things-singing opera, driving cars, acting in Hollywood-in ways that suggest new directions for American Indian history.

Scholars of the American West have largely overlooked the lives and work of three women public historians who, in the 1930s and 1940s, produced some of the most important writings about Oklahoma and the Southwest. Patricia Loughlin illuminates the contributions of Muriel H Wright, Angie Debo, and Alice Marriott to the study of the West and American Indians. Muriel Wright, an Oklahoma Choctaw, promoted Oklahoma history in her writings for the 'Chronicles of Oklahoma, ' a journal published by the Oklahoma Historical Society. Wright focused on the progress, strength, and endurance of American Indian cultures.

Going beyond the story of America as a country “discovered” by a few brave men in the “New World,” Indigenous human rights advocate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals the roles that settler colonialism and policies of American Indian genocide played in forming our national identity. Includes discussion topics, archival images, original maps, recommendations for further reading, and other materials to encourage students, teachers, and general readers to think critically about their own place in history.

Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in this book, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of natives who were kidnapped and enslaved. The Other Slavery reveals a key missing piece of American history. For over two centuries we have fought over, abolished, and tried to come to grips with African-American slavery. It is time for the West to confront an entirely separate, equally devastating enslavement

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. Accessibly written and revelatory, “All the Real Indians Died Off” challenges listeners to rethink what they have been taught about Native Americans and history.

Between 1902 and 1934, the United States confined hundreds of adults and children from dozens of Native nations at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians. Canton Asylum was one of many places of imposed removal and confinement, including reservations, boarding schools, orphanages, and prison-hospitals. 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 U.S. social and cultural history generally.

Discover indigenous wisdom for a life well lived in "The Seven Generations and the Seven Grandfather Teachings." Based on ancient teachings from the Anishinaabe/Ojibwe people, this spiritual translation of the sacred laws guides us toward Mino-bimaadiziwin, "the good life" - a life of harmony, free from contradiction or conflict. Prepare to embark on a path to peace, balance and personal growth where ancestral knowledge offers timeless lessons for transforming our lives and the lives of future generations.

A compelling study that charts the influence of Indigenous thinkers on Franz Boas, the founder of modern anthropology In 1911, the publication of Franz Boas's The Mind of Primitive Man challenged widely held claims about race and intelligence that justified violence and inequality. Now, a group of leading scholars examines how this groundbreaking work hinged on relationships with a global circle of Indigenous thinkers who used Boasian anthropology as a medium for their ideas. Contributors also examine how Boasian thought intersected with the work of major modernist figures, demonstrating how ideas of diversity and identity sprang from colonization and empire.

This book brings together a diverse group of American Indian thinkers to discuss traditional and contemporary philosophies and philosophical issues. Covers American Indian thinking on issues concerning time, place, history, science, law, religion, nationhood, and art. Features newly commissioned essays by authors of American Indian descent. Includes a comprehensive bibliography to aid in research and inspire further reading.

Charles Eastman straddled two worlds in his life and writing. The author of Indian Boyhood was raised in the traditional way after the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War. His father later persuaded him to study Christianity and attend medical school. But when Eastman served as a government doctor during the Wounded Knee massacre, he became disillusioned about Americans' capacity to live up to their own ideals. While Eastman's contemporaries viewed him as "a great American and a true philosopher," Indian scholars have long dismissed Eastman's work as assimilationist. Now, for the first time, his philosophy as manifested in his writing is examined in detail.

A necessary reckoning with America's troubled history of injustice to Indigenous people. After One Hundred Winters confronts the harsh truth that the United States was founded on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people and asks what reconciliation might mean in light of this haunted history. In this timely and urgent book, settler historian Margaret Jacobs tells the stories of the individuals and communities who are working together to heal historical wounds. Drawing on dozens of interviews, After One Hundred Winters reveals how Indigenous people and settlers in America today, despite their troubled history, are finding unexpected gifts in reconciliation.

Addressing the government's criminalization of traditional forms of Diné marriage and sexuality, the Iñupiat people's changing conceptions of masculinity as they embrace the processes of globalization, Hawai'i's same-sex marriage bill, and reframe the thinking about Indigenous knowledge, nationhood, citizenship, history, identity, belonging, and the possibilities for a decolonial future. Contributors. Jodi A. Byrd (Chickasaw Nation), Joanne Barker (Lenape), Jennifer Nez Denetdale (Diné/Navajo), Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca, Hawk Clan) ,J. Khaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli), Melissa K. Nelson (Anishinaabe, Cree, Métis), Jessica Bissett Perea (Knik Tribe), Mark Rifkin.

This collection of interviews showcases twelve leading Native artists and activists who have challenged and helped reshape prevailing expectations about Native cultures and identities during the late twentieth century. Among the topics discussed are the effects of the New Age movement and other forms of cultural appropriation, current conflicts and disagreements within Native communities, connections to the environment, alcohol and drug addiction, the American Indian Movement, the blood-quantum debate, religious freedom, the value of elders, and obligations to past cultural traditions.

I Am Woman represents my personal struggle with womanhood, culture, traditional spiritual beliefs and political sovereignty, written during a time when that struggle was not over. My original intention was to empower Native women to take to heart their own personal struggle for Native feminist being. The changes made in this second edition of the text do not alter my original intention. It remains my attempt to present a Native woman's sociological perspective on the impacts of colonialism on us, as women, and on my self personally.

The new edition of a prize-winning memoir-in-poems, a meditation on life as a queer Indigenous man--available for the first time in the United States. Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to "cut a hole in the sky / to world inside." Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America.

Rooted in the Indigenous Americas and the Pacific, and drawing on disciplines ranging from literature to anthropology, contributors to Queer Indigenous Studies call Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements and allies to center an analysis that critiques the relationship between colonialism and heteropatriarchy. By answering critical turns in Indigenous scholarship that center Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies, contributors join in reshaping Native studies, queer studies, transgender studies, and Indigenous feminisms.

Raised on a reservation and in boarding schools, then educated at a state university, John writes as a contemporary Navajo poet. His is a new voice--one that understands life on both sides of the canyon that divides, but does not completely separate, the Diné people from their neighbors who live outside the reservation. With their recurring images of sheep, coyotes, and crows--and an ever-present Navajo grandmother--these poems carry echoes of an ancient time that seems to exist in parallel with our own.

Louise Lamphere met Eva Price in 1965 in Sheep Springs, New Mexico, on the eastern side of the Navajo Reservation. Over the next forty years, Lamphere developed a strong friendship with Price that expanded to include Eva's daughter, Carole Cadman, and granddaughter, Valerie Darwin. When Price expressed her desire to pass along her teachings about Navajo life to her children and grandchildren, Lamphere collaborated with Price, Cadman, and Darwin to create a narrative that highlights the voices of three generations of Navajo women.