American Indians and National Forests


Book Description

American Indians and National Forests tells the story of how the U.S. Forest Service and tribal nations dealt with sweeping changes in forest use, ownership, and management over the last century and a half. Indians and U.S. foresters came together over a shared conservation ethic on many cooperative endeavors; yet, they often clashed over how the nation’s forests ought to be valued and cared for on matters ranging from huckleberry picking and vision quests to road building and recreation development. Marginalized in American society and long denied a seat at the table of public land stewardship, American Indian tribes have at last taken their rightful place and are making themselves heard. Weighing indigenous perspectives on the environment is an emerging trend in public land management in the United States and around the world. The Forest Service has been a strong partner in that movement over the past quarter century.




Unearthing Indian Land


Book Description

Unearthing Indian Land offers a comprehensive examination of the consequencesof more than a century of questionable public policies. In this book,Kristin Ruppel considers the complicated issues surrounding American Indianland ownership in the United States. Under the General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act,individual Indians were issued title to land allotments while so-called ÒsurplusÓIndian lands were opened to non-Indian settlement. During the forty-seven yearsthat the act remained in effect, American Indians lost an estimated 90 millionacres of landÑabout two-thirds of the land they had held in 1887. Worse, theloss of control over the land left to them has remained an ongoing and insidiousresult. Unearthing Indian Land traces the complex legacies of allotment, includingnumerous instructive examples of a policy gone wrong. Aside from the initialcatastrophic land loss, the fractionated land ownership that resulted from theactÕs provisions has disrupted native families and their descendants for morethan a century. With each new generation, the owners of tribal lands grow innumber and therefore own ever smaller interests in parcels of land. It is not uncommonnow to find reservation allotments co-owned by hundreds of individuals.Coupled with the federal governmentÕs troubled trusteeship of Indian assets,this means that Indian landowners have very little control over their own lands. Illuminated by interviews with Native American landholders, this book isessential reading for anyone who is interested in what happened as a result of thefederal governmentÕs quasi-privatization of native lands.




Picturing Indians


Book Description

Liza Black critically examines the inner workings of post–World War II American films and production studios that cast American Indian extras and actors as Native people, forcing them to come face to face with mainstream representations of “Indianness.”




Indigenous Pop


Book Description

"This book is an interdisciplinary discussion of popular music performed and created by American Indian musicians, providing an important window into history, politics, and tribal communities as it simultaneously complements literary, historiographic, anthropological, and sociological discussions of Native culture"--Provided by publisher.




Lakota America


Book Description

The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America's history Named One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2019 - Named One of the 10 Best History Books of 2019 by Smithsonian Magazine - Winner of the MPIBA Reading the West Book Award for narrative nonfiction "Turned many of the stories I thought I knew about our nation inside out."--Cornelia Channing, Paris Review, Favorite Books of 2019 "My favorite non-fiction book of this year."--Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opinion "A briliant, bold, gripping history."--Simon Sebag Montefiore, London Evening Standard, Best Books of 2019 "All nations deserve to have their stories told with this degree of attentiveness"--Parul Sehgal, New York Times This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then--in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion--as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains. The Lakotas are imprinted in American historical memory. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. Hämäläinen's deeply researched and engagingly written history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.




Native Provenance


Book Description

Gerald Vizenor's Native Provenance challenges readers to consider the subtle ironies at the heart of Native American culture and oral traditions such as creation and trickster stories and dream songs. A respected authority in the study of Native American literature and intellectual history, Vizenor believes that the protean nature of many creation stories, with their tease and weave of ironic gestures, was lost or obfuscated in inferior translations by scholars and cultural connoisseurs, and as a result the underlying theories and presuppositions of these renditions persist in popular literature and culture. Native Provenance explores more than two centuries of such betrayal of native creativity. With erudite and sweeping virtuosity, Vizenor examines how ethnographers and others converted the inherent confidence of native stories into uneasy sentiments of victimry. He explores the connection between Native Americans and Jews through gossip theory and strategies of cultural survivance, and between natural motion and ordinary practices of survivance. Other topics include the unique element of native liberty inherent in artistic milieus; the genre of visionary narratives of resistance; and the notions of historical absence, cultural nihilism, and victimry. Native Provenance is a tour de force of Native American cultural criticism ranging widely across the terrains of the artistic, literary, philosophical, linguistic, historical, ethnographic, and sociological aspects of interpreting native stories. Native Provenance is rife with poignant and original observations and is essential reading for anyone interested in Native American cultures and literature.







Indians Illustrated


Book Description

After 1850, Americans swarmed to take in a raft of new illustrated journals and papers. Engravings and drawings of "buckskinned braves" and "Indian princesses" proved an immensely popular attraction for consumers of publications like Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly . In Indians Illustrated , John M. Coward charts a social and cultural history of Native American illustrations--romantic, violent, racist, peaceful, and otherwise--in the heyday of the American pictorial press. These woodblock engravings and ink drawings placed Native Americans into categories that drew from venerable "good" Indian and "bad" Indian stereotypes already threaded through the culture. Coward's examples show how the genre cemented white ideas about how Indians should look and behave--ideas that diminished Native Americans' cultural values and political influence. His powerful analysis of themes and visual tropes unlocks the racial codes and visual cues that whites used to represent--and marginalize--native cultures already engaged in a twilight struggle against inexorable westward expansion.




Standing Up to Colonial Power


Book Description

Standing Up to Colonial Power focuses on the lives, activism, and intellectual contributions of Henry Cloud (1884-1950), a Ho-Chunk, and Elizabeth Bender Cloud (1887-1965), an Ojibwe, both of whom grew up amid settler colonialism that attempted to break their connection to Native land, treaty rights, and tribal identities. Mastering ways of behaving and speaking in different social settings and to divergent audiences, including other Natives, white missionaries, and Bureau of Indian Affairs officials, Elizabeth and Henry relied on flexible and fluid notions of gender, identity, culture, community, and belonging as they traveled Indian Country and within white environments to fight for Native rights. Elizabeth fought against termination as part of her role in the National Congress of American Indians and General Federation of Women's Clubs, while Henry was one of the most important Native policy makers of the early twentieth century. He documented the horrible abuse within the federal boarding schools and co-wrote the Meriam Report of 1928, which laid the foundation for the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Together they ran an early college preparatory Christian high school, the American Indian Institute. Standing Up to Colonial Power shows how the Clouds combined Native warrior and modern identities as a creative strategy to challenge settler colonialism, to become full members of the U.S. nation-state, and to fight for tribal sovereignty. Renya K. Ramirez uses her dual position as a scholar and as the granddaughter of Elizabeth and Henry Cloud to weave together this ethnography and family-tribal history.




Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States


Book Description

“All those interested in Indigenous food systems, sovereignty issues, or environment, and their path toward recovery should read this powerful book.” —Kathie L. Beebe, American Indian Quarterly Centuries of colonization and other factors have disrupted indigenous communities’ ability to control their own food systems. This volume explores the meaning and importance of food sovereignty for Native peoples in the United States, and asks whether and how it might be achieved and sustained. Unprecedented in its focus and scope, this collection addresses nearly every aspect of indigenous food sovereignty, from revitalizing ancestral gardens and traditional ways of hunting, gathering, and seed saving to the difficult realities of racism, treaty abrogation, tribal sociopolitical factionalism, and the entrenched beliefs that processed foods are superior to traditional tribal fare. The contributors include scholar-activists in the fields of ethnobotany, history, anthropology, nutrition, insect ecology, biology, marine environmentalism, and federal Indian law, as well as indigenous seed savers and keepers, cooks, farmers, spearfishers, and community activists. After identifying the challenges involved in revitalizing and maintaining traditional food systems, these writers offer advice and encouragement to those concerned about tribal health, environmental destruction, loss of species habitat, and governmental food control.