American Indian History

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.

The belief that Native Americans might belong to the fabled “lost tribes of Israel” - Israelites driven from their homeland around 740 BCE - took hold among Anglo-Americans and Indigenous peoples in the United States during its first half century. In Lost Tribes Found, Matthew W. Dougherty explores what this idea can tell us about religious nationalism in early America.

Indian Creek Massacre and Captivity of Hall Girls was written by Charles Martin Scanlan in 1915. The Indian Creek Massacre arose in 1832 at LaSalle County, Illinois, after a dispute about a settler-constructed dam that blocked fish from reaching a Native American village downstream. It’s a unique historical snapshot of early America centered around Sylvia and Rachel Hall, sisters who were the only survivors of the massacre and were abducted, as well as the story of Chief Shabona who was a member of the Ottowa and Potawatomi.

In the first book to focus on relations between Indians and emigrants on the Overland Trails, Michael L. Tate shows that such encounters were far more often characterized by cooperation than by conflict. Having combed hundreds of unpublished sources and Indian oral traditions, Tate finds Indians and Anglo-Americans continuously trading goods and news with each other, and Indians providing various forms of assistance to overlanders.

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.

What if the history of America's largest Indian nation is actually a polite modern fiction, one invented by "anthropologists and other friends"? In this sweeping revisionist study of the Cherokee Indians, a scholar trained in classical philology and the new science of genetics discloses the inside story of his tribe. The narrative starts in the third century BCE and concludes with the Cherokees' removal to Indian Territory in the 19th century, when all standard histories just begin.

One of the most groundbreaking and highly acclaimed titles that Heyday has published, The Ohlone Way describes the culture of the Indian people who inhabited the Bay Area prior to the arrival of Europeans. Recently included in the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Top 100 Western Non-Fiction” list, The Ohlone Way has been described by critic Pat Holt as a “mini-classic”.

Author grew up as an Indian, went to work in the White man's world as a doctor, and wrote extensively about Indian history, culture, values, honor, and being pushed off the land to Indian Reservations.

When the peoples of the Indian Territory found themselves in the midst of the American Civil War, squeezed between union Kansas, confederate Texas, and Arkansas, they had no way to escape a conflict not of their choosing - and no alternative but to suffer its consequences. When the Wolf Came explores how the war in the Indian Territory involved almost every resident, killed many civilians as well as soldiers, left the country stripped and devastated, and cost Indian nations millions of acres of land.

Indian lore of the Cuyamaca Mountains and surrounding region in San Diego County, California, abounds in myths and legends handed down from generation to generation by tribal song and squaw-tale. Yet so swiftly has the hand of civilization wiped out the old traditions and customs, that but few Indians remain who remember them, and fewer still are those willing to divulge them. Only when one comes into intimate contact with them is one accorded the privilege and honor of hearing the tales of their ancestors.

A thriving fur trade post between 1830 and 1860, Fort Clark, in what is today western North Dakota, also served as a way station for artists, scientists, missionaries, soldiers, and other western chroniclers traveling along the Upper Missouri River. The written and visual legacies of these visitors have long been the primary sources of information on the cultures of the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, the peoples who met the first fur traders in the area. This book is the first account of the fur trade at Fort Clark to integrate new archaeological evidence into the history.

The first people who lived on the northern plains of what today is the US called themselves "Lakota", meaning "the people", a word which provides the semantic basis for Dakota. The first European people to meet the Lakota called them "Sioux", a contraction of "Nadowessioux", a now-archaic French-Canadian word meaning "snake", or enemy.

Men from more than two dozen tribal peoples actively participated in the Civil War by fighting for one side or the other. Recent estimates are that more than 28,000 Indians served as Civil War soldiers. Native Americans in the Civil War: The History and Legacy of Various Indian Tribes’ Participation in the War Between the States explains the various roles played by Native Americans in America’s deadliest war.

Una guía fascinante de los conflictos que ocurrieron en América del Norte y su impacto en las tribus nativas americanas.

On the morning of November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington led 700 militiamen in a surprise attack against Cheyenne leader Black Kettle's camp at Sand Creek. Chivington was a fire and brimstone Methodist minister who had publicly advocated indiscriminately killing Native American children because "nits makes lice."

The most astute and sensitive observer of Indian life, as told by himself as insider later brought into the White world by his father.

The remarkable story of the author of Indian Boyhood's growth into the White world at his father's recommendation because he says the Indian's world is over; how Charles learns and adapts to it; and what he learns along the way.

Insightful, telling, ironic, and moving, 14 Native-American legends reflect a nomadic non-property-owning culture, with a reverence for all things natural.

Arguably the last Indians living in Central Florida in 1883 were all massacred because the chief's favorite squaw loved White Man Cow. John asked the President of the United States to send soldiers to remove the Indians. John didn't think his request was out of line; after all the government had earlier been moving Indians to the "Indians Territory" (now Oklahoma) for years. But the President wouldn't do it. So John had to do it. He killed every man, woman and child. This is the story of why he did it.

Charles Alexander Eastman (1858-1939) was raised among the Sioux and decided to become a doctor in order to be of the greatest service to his people. He also became a distinguished writer and an interpreter of Native American life and customs. The Soul of the Indian is a rare eye-witness account of native religion with its ceremonial and symbolic worship, oral scriptures and view of the spirit world.