Native Science

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.

After a security guard is found dead and another wounded at the Children's Museum of Science and History in Norman, Oklahoma, Detective Monique Blue Hawk and her partner Chris Pierson are summoned to investigate. They find no fingerprints, no footprints, and no obvious means to enter the locked building.

For Jonathon Roth and his family, a vacation in Cozumel became a nightmare. Pawns in a deadly ritual, Roth and his children barely escaped with their lives, and with the secrets of mastermind Jacob Calakmul. Calakmul’s endgame: to fulfill the Jaguar Prophecies—the foretelling of an inevitable Armageddon, one that will destroy entire nations. The key to stopping it is to retrieve an ancient codex—if Roth can decipher it.

As a 41-year-old man confronts his own mortality in this collection's title story, he recalls his Spokane Indian father's chilling death from alcoholism and diabetes. Another tale features an eccentric salesman pursuing a married woman from airport to airport. And then there's the film editor who sees nothing wrong with altering footage to fit preconceived views - until he becomes the target of media distortion.

The Mayans maintained power in the Yucatan for over 1,000 years, and at the height of its Classical era, the city of Tikal was one of the power centers of the empire. Archaeologists believe Tikal had been built as early as the fifth or fourth century BC. Eventually it became a political, economic, and military capital that was an important part of a far-flung network across Mesoamerica.

In August 1862, after decades of broken treaties, increasing hardship, and relentless encroachment on their lands, a group of Dakota warriors convened a council at the tepee of their leader, Little Crow. Knowing the strength and resilience of the young American nation, Little Crow counseled caution, but anger won the day. Forced to either lead his warriors in a war he knew they could not win or leave them to their fates, he declared, "[Little Crow] is not a coward: he will die with you."

Cyclonic hordes of insects, a telepathic despot, body-swapping sex - just a few of the surprises Salvador Samuels encounters when he’s swept back to precolonial times, walking in the moccasins of a blind Indian - who, in turn, has been transported into Salvador’s body in present-day America. Four hundred years apart, they’re bound by a mission to rescue our world, aided by the mysterious presence of the mounds. Thousands of these ancient earthworks once dotted the landscape of North America.

In this thrilling story of intellectual and archaeological discovery, David Roberts recounts his last 20 years of far-flung exploits in search of spectacular prehistoric ruins and rock art panels known to very few modern travelers. His adventures range across Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado, and illuminate the mysteries of the Ancestral Puebloans and their contemporary neighbors the Mogollon and Fremont, as well as of the more recent Navajo and Comanche.

At the turn of the 19th century, one mile east of Grand Marais, Minnesota, you would have found Chippewa City, a village that as many as 200 Anishinaabe families called home. Today you will find only Highway 61, private lakeshore property, and the one remaining village building: St. Francis Xavier Church. In Walking the Old Road, Staci Lola Drouillard guides listeners through the story of that lost community, reclaiming for history the Ojibwe voices that have for so long, and so unceremoniously, been silenced.

In this fascinating work, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota and Red Lake Ojibwe Nation member Brenda J. Child spotlights the remarkable women of the Ojibwe Nation. A stunning look at a seldom explored subject in history, Holding Our World Together shows how American Indian women have profoundly influenced Native American life - from the days of the European fur trade to the present - in activism, community, and beyond.

Everything that was green and good is gone, scorched away by a war that no one living remembers. The small surviving human population scavenges to get by; they cannot read or write and lack the tools or knowledge to rebuild. The only ones with any power are the mindless Enforcers, controlled by the Madjideye, a faceless, formless spiritual entity that has infiltrated the world to subjugate the human population.

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.

Here is one of the most extraordinary and invaluable documents in the annals of Native American history: the authentic testament of a remarkable "war shaman" who, for several years, held off both Mexico and the United States in fierce defense of Apache lands. During 1905 and 1906, Geronimo, the legendary Apache warrior and honorary war chief, dictated his story through a native interpreter to S. M. Barrett.

Navajo myths are among the most poetic in the world, full of dazzling word imagery. For the Navajo, who call themselves the Dine (literally, "the People"), the story of emergence—their creation myth—lies at the heart of their beliefs. In it, all the world is created together, both gods and human beings, embodying the idea that change comes from within rather than without. Poet and author Gerald Hausman collects this and other stories with meditations that together capture the essence of the Navajo people's way of life and their understanding of the world.

Charles Alexander Eastman (1858-1939) was a mixed-blood Sioux. He became one of the best known Indians of his time, receiving a bachelor of science degree from Dartmouth in 1887 and a medical degree from Boston University three years later.

In 1872, dinosaur hunters become embroiled in a battle over the discovery of fossils in Northern Ontario as their excavation crews are driven mad by a bizarre and terrifying illness. Over a hundred years later, Church and his family show signs of the same monstrous affliction. As he begins to unravel his family’s dark history, Church must race to protect the secrets buried deep in bones and blood.

En los años veinte, la comunidad india de los Osage en Oklahoma era la población de mayor renta per cápita del mundo. El petróleo que yacía bajo sus propiedades les convirtió en millonarios: construyeron mansiones, tenían chóferes privados y mandaban a sus hijos a estudiar a Europa. Pero un espiral de violencia asoló esta comunidad indígena cuando sus miembros empezaron a morir y a desaparecer en extrañas circunstancias. La familia de una mujer Osage, Mollie Burkhart, se convirtió en un objetivo principal.

Many of us don’t know much about mythological stories from these regions, and it is my pleasure and privilege to educate you on the intricate details that lie within them. That’s why I have also provided some fascinating facts and historical background about each of these peoples. Creation myths, legacies, the sacrificing of children, the empires, and their wars are all mentioned and touched on in this book.

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.

National parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier preserve some of this country's most cherished wilderness landscapes. While visions of pristine, uninhabited nature led to the creation of these parks, they also inspired policies of Indian removal. By contrasting the native histories of these places with the links between Indian policy developments and preservationist efforts, this work examines the complex origins of the national parks and the troubling consequences of the American wilderness ideal.