Indigenous America

Explore captivating Native American myths.

Canada is not one nation, but three: English Canada, Quebec, and First Nations. Yet as a country Canada is very successful, in part because it maintains national diversity through bilingualism, multiculturalism, and federalism. Alongside this contemporary openness Canada also has its own history to contend with; with a legacy of broken treaties and residential schools for its Indigenous peoples, making reconciliation between Canada and First Nations an ongoing journey, not a destination.

Shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, told his story - up to a certain point. "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground", he said, "and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened." It is precisely this point - that of a people faced with the end of their way of life - that prompts the philosophical and ethical inquiry pursued in Radical Hope. In Jonathan Lear's view, Plenty Coups' story raises a profound ethical question that transcends his time and challenges us all.

Brilliant, listenable, and raw. Maj. (ret.) Danny Sjursen, who served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at West Point, delivers a true epic and the perfect companion to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

Growing up in Yakima, Washington, Noe Álvarez worked at an apple-packing plant alongside his mother. A university scholarship offered escape, but as a first-generation Latino college-goer, Álvarez struggled to fit in. At 19, he learned about a Native American/First Nations movement called the Peace and Dignity Journeys, epic marathons meant to renew cultural connections across North America. He dropped out of school and joined a group runners, all fleeing difficult beginnings. Telling their stories and his own, Álvarez writes about a four-month-long journey from Canada to Guatemala.

Dive into the amazing story of Jamaica, a country shaped by the trials of slavery and the incredible strength of its people. This audiobook tells how enslaved Africans, despite enduring terrible hardships, built the foundation of Jamaica’s vibrant culture and heritage.

In the summer of 2017, twenty-two-year-old Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind vanished. A week after she disappeared, police arrested the white couple who lived upstairs from Savanna and emerged from their apartment carrying an infant girl. The baby was Savanna’s, but Savanna’s body would not be found for days. The horrifying crime sent shock waves far beyond Fargo, North Dakota, where it occurred, and helped expose the sexual and physical violence Native American women and girls have endured since the country’s colonization.

The conquest of the American West through violence and corrupt treaties in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed the global balance of power. It was an upheaval on a grand scale, but acclaimed author Peter Stark shows us its fundamental conflicts through the clash between two men—Shawnee chief and warrior Tecumseh and Indiana governor William Henry Harrison.

We have long been taught to presume that modern global history began when the "Old World" encountered the "New", when Christopher Columbus “discovered” America in 1492. As Caroline Dodds Pennock conclusively shows in this groundbreaking book, for tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others—enslaved people, diplomats, explorers, servants, traders—the reverse was true: they discovered Europe. For them, Europe comprised savage shores, a land of riches and marvels, yet perplexing for its brutal disparities of wealth and quality of life, and its baffling beliefs.

Weaving together more than a hundred interviews with Davis's bandmates, family members, friends, and peers, this book powerfully reconstructs Davis's extraordinary life and career. Washita Love Child thoroughly and finally restores the "red dirt boogie brother" to his rightful place in rock history, cementing his legacy for generations to come.

While Western accounts of North American history traditionally start with European colonization, Indigenous histories of North America—or Turtle Island—stretch back millennia. Drawing on comparative analysis, firsthand Indigenous accounts, extensive historical writings, and his own experience, Omaha Tribal member, Cherokee citizen, and teacher Taylor Keen presents a comprehensive re-imagining of the ancient and more recent history of this continent’s oldest cultures.

In this enthralling narrative, professor and award-winning author Jeffrey Ostler recounts the Lakota Sioux’s loss of their spiritual homeland and their remarkable legal battle to regain it. Moving easily from battlefields to reservations to Supreme Court chambers, Ostler captures the strength that bore the Lakotas through the worst times and kept alive the dream of reclaiming their cherished lands.

Encounters at the Heart of the World concerns the Mandan Indians, iconic Plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were, for centuries, at the center of the North American universe. We know of them mostly because Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805 with them, but why don't we know more? Who were they really? In this extraordinary book, Elizabeth A. Fenn retrieves their history by piecing together important new discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, geology, climatology, epidemiology, and nutritional science.

Wizard of the Upper Amazon is an extraordinary document of the life among a tribe of South American Indians at the beginning of the 20th century. For many listeners, the most compelling sections of the audiobook will be the descriptions of the use of Banisteriopsis caapi, the ayahuasca of the Amazon forests. This powerful hallucinogen has long been credited with the ability to transport human beings to realms of experience where telepathy and clairvoyance are commonplace. Manual Córdova, the narrator of these adventures, is well-known as a healer in Peru.

Pandemics and war, social turmoil and corrupt governments, natural disasters and environmental collapse—it's hard not to watch the signs of the times and feel afraid. But we can journey through that fear to find hope. With the warnings of a prophet and the lively voice of a storyteller, Choctaw elder and author of Ladder to the Light Steven Charleston speaks to all who sense apocalyptic dread rising around and within.

American Indians remain familiar as icons, yet poorly understood as historical agents. In this ambitious book that ranges across Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and eastern California (a region known as the Great Basin), Ned Blackhawk places Native peoples squarely at the center of a dynamic and complex story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West.

The first book; provides a comprehensive and unbiased account of the history of Indigenous Peoples in North America. The second book; explores Native American herbalism and how it can improve health, wellness, and vitality.

The received idea of Native American history - as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did 150 Sioux die at the hands of the US Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. 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.

It officially began on February 28, 2006, when a handful of protesters from the nearby Six Nations reserve walked onto Douglas Creek Estates, then a residential subdivision under construction, and blocked workers from entering....

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.