Native American Politics

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.

Unflinchingly honest about the brutality of this nation’s founding and its legacy of settler-colonialism and genocide, the impact of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s 2014 book is profound. This classic is revisited with new material that takes an incisive look at the post-Obama era from the war in Afghanistan to Charlottesville’s white supremacy-fueled rallies, and from the onset of the pandemic to the election of President Biden.

Indian peoples made some 400 treaties with the United States between the American Revolution and 1871, when Congress prohibited them. They signed nine treaties with the Confederacy, as well as countless others over the centuries with Spain, France, Britain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, Canada, and even Russia, not to mention individual colonies and states. In retrospect, the treaties seem like well-ordered steps on the path of dispossession and empire. The reality was far more complicated.

In this accessible and innovative work, Susan Burch tells the story of the Indigenous people - families, communities, and nations, across generations to the present day - who have experienced the impact of this history. 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 US social and cultural history generally.

Jacksonland is the thrilling narrative history of two men - President Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief John Ross - who led their respective nations at a crossroads of American history. Five decades after the Revolutionary War, the United States approached a constitutional crisis. At its center stood two former military comrades locked in a struggle that tested the boundaries of our fledgling democracy. Jacksonland is their story.

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

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.

Long before the indigenous people of southeastern North America first encountered Europeans and Africans, they established communities with clear social and political hierarchies and rich cultural traditions. Award-winning historian Gregory D. Smithers brings this world to life in Native Southerners, a sweeping narrative of American Indian history in the Southeast from the time before European colonialism to the Trail of Tears and beyond.

Drawing on archeological and ethno-historical evidence, Irving Rouse sketches a picture of the Tainos-the first people Columbus encountered when he arrived in the Americas-as they existed during the time of Columbus, contrasting their customs with those of their neighbors. He then moves backward in time to the ancestors of the Tainos-two successive groups who settled the West Indies and who are known to archeologists as the Saladoid peoples and the Ostionoid peoples.

The name "Geronimo" evokes a number of different emotions. Those who believed in 19th century America's "Manifest Destiny" viewed Geronimo and all Native Americans as impediments to God's will for the nation. Descendants of people killed by "hostile" Natives certainly considered warriors like Geronimo to be murderers and thieves whose cultures and societies held no redeeming values.

Native Country of the Heart is the writer and activist Cherrie Moraga's love letter to her "unlettered" mother. It begins with her mother, Elvira Isabel Moraga, who as a child, along with her siblings, was hired out by her own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The lives of Cherrie and her mother, and of their people, are woven together in a story of critical reflection and deep personal revelation as Moraga charts her own coming to consciousness alongside the heartbreaking story of her mother's decline.

When Kristin L. Hoganson arrived in Champaign, Illinois, after teaching at Harvard, studying at Yale, and living in the DC metro area with various stints overseas, she expected to find her new home, well, isolated. Even provincial. After all, she had landed in the American heartland, a place where the nation's identity exists in its pristine form. Or so we have been taught to believe.

When he died in 1904, most Americans who knew his people's story considered Chief Joseph a military genius and an "Indian Napoleon". This assessment of the Native American leader was based on a 1,500-mile odyssey during which he and his people left their reservation in the hopes of escaping to Canada, where the Nez Percé intended to join Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapa Sioux band. The real Chief Joseph was a gifted speaker and more diplomat than war leader.

In 1872, during a fight along the Yellowstone River between US troops protecting railroad workers and Sioux warriors, one of the Sioux did something both unusual and inspiring. At the height of the battle, with bullets whizzing all around him, this warrior sat down, loaded his cannupa (sacred pipe), and began to smoke, partaking in his people's religious sacrament.

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.

Among the Oglala Lakota, one of the most famous bands of the Native American Tribe known as the Sioux, the longest and most effective leader was Makhpiyaluta, better known as Red Cloud. Though he has not been remembered as vividly as another member of the Oglala Lakota, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud led the group for 40 years, in war, in peace, and on a reservation, becoming so esteemed and influential that Americans began to mistakenly take him for the leader of the entire Sioux tribe.

Hoy en día en Estados Unidos hay más de quinientas naciones indígenas reconocidas por el Gobierno federal que comprenden casi tres millones de personas, descendientes de los quince millones de nativos que habitaban esas tierras. El programa genocida que los colonos desarrollaron durante siglos ha sido omitido, en gran medida, de la historia, pero, ahora, por primera vez, la historiadora y activista Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz nos ofrece una historia de Estados Unidos contada desde la perspectiva de los pueblos indígenas.

One of the most definitive accounts of the training and work of a Pipe Carrier, I Send a Voice is a gripping first-person account inside a Native American sweat lodge ceremony. Evelyn Eaton writes of her resolve to become worthy of participating in this healing ritual as she embraces the whole length of "the hero's journey." Through tests and ordeals inside and outside of the lodge while following the shamanic spiritual path, she arrives at her ultimate request—a healing pipe of her own.

Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is home to the original people of this land, yet it is also one of the poorest communities in America. Through intimate and vulnerable memoir, Lakota twin sisters Sarah Eagle Heart and Emma Eagle Heart-White recount growing up on the reservation and overcoming enormous odds, first as teenage girls in a majority-white high school, and then battling bias in their professional careers. Woven throughout are self-help strategies centering women of color, that combine marginalized histories, psychological research on trauma, and perspectives on decolonial therapy.

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.