Native Indian

Deep in the heart of Northern Arizona, in a small and isolated patch of the vast 17.5 million-acre Navajo reservation, sits Chinle High School. Here, basketball is passion, passed from grandparent to parent to child. Celebrated Times journalist Michael Powell brings us a narrative of triumph and hardship, a moving story about a basketball team on a Navajo reservation that shows how important sports can be to youths in struggling communities, and the transcendent magic and painful realities that confront Native Americans living on reservations.

In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington's small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government's auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence.

When superstar athlete Jim Thorpe and football legend Pop Warner met in 1904 at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, they forged one of the winningest teams in American football history. Called "the team that invented football", they took on the best opponents of their day, defeating much more privileged schools such as Harvard and Army in a series of breathtakingly close calls, genius plays, and bone-crushing hard work.

Millie Two Bears lives alone in a trailer in the heart of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana. Since her husband went to jail, she’s been on the outs with the reservation. And it’s not just people she has to contend with. Now the prairie dogs are moving in on her patch of land. When a strange woman comes into Millie’s life, and Millie’s rodent war escalates, a fateful confrontation with vengeance, secrets, and survival is just underfoot.

Author Kathleen DuVal argues that it was Indians rather than European would-be colonizers who were more often able to determine the form and content of the relations between the two groups. Along the banks of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, far from Paris, Madrid, and London, European colonialism met neither accommodation nor resistance but incorporation. Placing Indians at the center of the story, DuVal shows both their diversity and our contemporary tendency to exaggerate the influence of Europeans in places far from their centers of power.

Darrell Dennis is a stereotype-busting, politically incorrect Native American/Aboriginal/Shuswap. With a large dose of humour and irreverence, he untangles some of the truths and myths about First Nations: Why do people think Natives get free trucks, and why didn’t he ever get one? Why does the length of your hair determine whether you’re good or bad? By what ratio does the amount of rain in a year depend on the amount of cactus liquor you consume? In addition to answering these burning questions, Dennis tackles some tougher subjects.

In March 1621, when Plymouth’s survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth’s governor, John Carver, declared their people’s friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousamequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the 'First Thanksgiving'. The treaty remained operative until King Philip’s War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end.

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.

In this enlightening book, 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.

Capture the beauty, power, and wisdom of the Native American oral tradition with this superlative collection of readings taken from the writings and speeches of people from many different tribes. The collection offers insights into Native American ways of living, learning, and dying, and helps us to feel a reconnection with the land and ourselves. The words of Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Ohiyesa, Black Elk, and others create a powerful listening experience.

An acclaimed book and widely acknowledged classic, The Middle Ground steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations—stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut.

Termed the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the southwestern Indians and the first protest novel of California, Ramona is the story of 3 cultures - Indian, Mexican, and Anglo - locked in combat. The upheaval and injustice are humanized through the romance of a beautiful half-Indian orphan who grow up as the ward of Señora Moreno in privileged surroundings, then falls in love with an Indian and joins him in a life of poverty and tragedy. The Ramona Pageant in Hemet, California, based on this romance, has played each year since 1923, reenacting the transition period between Mexican traditions and the new U.S. and state governments.

Be ready to immerse yourself into the myths and long forgotten stories of the Native Americans. Discover how those myths took life through many stories, and what they were at their core. Native Americans were one with nature, and that’s why their myths are so fascinating as well. This book by author Lewis Spence serves as an insight into how the First Nations saw the world and how they forged history as we know it through their beliefs and traditions, before the impact of other cultures.

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.

Baffled by the stereotypes presented by Hollywood and much historical fiction, many other Americans find the contemporary American Indian an enigma. Compounding their confusion is the highly publicized struggle of the contemporary Indian for self-determination, lost land, cultural preservation, and fundamental human rights - a struggle dramatized both by public acts of protest and by precedent-setting legal actions. American Indians, American Justice explores the complexities of the present Indian situation, particularly with regard to legal and political rights.

The last "Indian War" was fought against Native American children in the dormitories and classrooms of government boarding schools. Only by removing Indian children from their homes for extended periods of time, policymakers reasoned, could white "civilization" take root while childhood memories of "savagism" gradually faded to the point of extinction. In the words of one official: "Kill the Indian and save the man."

Why seek outside answers when you already possess the resources and power you need? Noted Native American speaker turned author D. J. Eagle Bear Vanas uses wisdom from his Odawa Indian roots and his path as an officer in the US Air Force and later as an entrepreneur to interweave the Native tradition of storytelling with practical key bits of knowledge to live and learn by. By following Vanas’s direction, you can develop your talent and ability to better serve and defend others.

Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, 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 by the conquistadors, then forced to descend into the "mouth of hell" of 18th-century silver mines or, later, made to serve as domestics for Mormon settlers and rich Anglos.

In Indian Country: Missing. Two young Lakota women, Anya Fast Runner and Veronica Likes Pretty Dresses, have gone missing, one reported missing on the reservation and the other in the county, Mike taking the report himself. Both cases are obviously related and both ladies were last seen with his old nemesis Raymond Angry Boy Whitecloud.

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.