Articles and databases
Encyclopedias and other reference resources
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Biographical Dictionary of American Indian History to 1900
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"Biographical Dictionary of American Indian History to 1900 summarizes the lives of a wide range of Indians and non-Indians central to Native American history. In more than 1,000 A-to-Z entries, author Carl Waldman profiles men and women who have made significant contributions from early contact until 1900. Not limited to chiefs and war leaders, the book also includes traders, prophets and religious leaders, statesmen, artists and photographers, medicine men and women, and scholars and educators. This revised edition also features expanded subject indexes, a new further reading list/bibliography, and a new general index."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Call Number: General Collection, E89 .W35 2001Publication Date: 2000 -
Native America in the Twentieth Century
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First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Call Number: General Collection, E76.2 .N36 1994Publication Date: 1994 -
Historical Dictionary of Native American Movements
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Native Americans in the United States, similar to other indigenous people, created political, economic, and social movements to meet and adjust to major changes that impacted their cultures. For centuries, Native Americans dealt with the onslaught of non-Indian land claims, the appropriation of their homelands, and the destruction of their ways of life. Through various movements, Native Americans accepted, rejected, or accommodated themselves to the non-traditional worldviews of the colonizers and their policies. The Historical Dictionary of Native American Movements--through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on important persons, places, events, and institutions and significant political, economic, social, and cultural aspects--is a useful reference on topics dealing with key movements, organizations, leadership strategies, and the major issues Native Americans have confronted.
Call Number: General Collection, E93 .L43 2008Publication Date: 2008 -
Native American Issues
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This handbook provides an unbiased, in-depth assessment of the struggles, successes, and status of Native Americans in what is now the United States from the time of the first European settlers to the present. * A chronology examines the impact of actions such as the 1972 March on Washington, the Dawes Act, and litigation such as Bryan v. Itasca County on Native American communities * Includes a comprehensive annotated bibliography of books and nonprint resources
Call Number: General Collection, E98.T77 T56 2005Publication Date: 2005 -
Encyclopedia of Indian Wars
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Acclaimed independent history scholar Gregory Michno has created a chronological listing of every significant fight between Indians and the United States Army, as well as better-known Indian battles with civilian emigrants. This detailed study is more tha
Call Number: General Collection, E81 .M53 2003Publication Date: 2003 -
Atlas of the North American Indian
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"Combining clear, informative text with a wealth of maps and illustrations, this unique resource on native Americans offers comprehensive coverage in a single volume. History, culture, languages, and lifeways of American Indian groups across North America are included. This long-awaited revision has an appealing new design and incorporates many political and cultural developments, such as the creation of the Canadian territory Nunavut and Indian gaming, as well as new archaeological discoveries and theories. Also included are new and updated maps, a glossary, updated appendixes, and an expanded bibliography."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Call Number: General Collection, E77 .W195 2000BPublication Date: 2000 -
Encyclopedia of Indiana Indians: Tribes, Nations, and People of the Woodlands
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Call Number: General Collection, E78.I53 E52 1998Publication Date: 1998
Books
Listed below are some recent books about Native American History. Many more are available; to find others, search OneSearch for "Indians of North America" and "history," and limit your results to "book/ebook." For additional tips, see this guide's "Books" page.
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The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present
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Beginning with the tribes' devastating loss of land and the forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools, he shows how the period of greatest adversity also helped to incubate a unifying Native identity. He traces how conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of their self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is an essential, intimate history - and counter-narrative - of a resilient people in a transformative era.
Call Number: General Collection, E77 .T797 2019Publication Date: 2019 -
Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War
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Oliver Otis Howard thought he was a man of destiny. Chosen to lead the Freedmen's Bureau after the Civil War, the Union Army general was entrusted with the era's most crucial task: helping millions of former slaves claim the rights of citizens. He was energized by the belief that abolition and Reconstruction, the country's great struggles for liberty and equality, were God's plan for himself and the nation. To honor his righteous commitment to a new American freedom, Howard University was named for him. But as the nation's politics curdled in the 1870s, General Howard exiled himself from Washington, D.C., rejoined the army, and was sent across the continent to command forces in the Pacific Northwest. Shattered by Reconstruction's collapse, he assumed a new mission: forcing Native Americans to become Christian farmers on government reservations. Howard's plans for redemption in the West ran headlong into the resistance of Chief Joseph, a young Nez Perce leader in northeastern Oregon who refused to leave his ancestral land. Claiming equal rights for Native Americans, Joseph was determined to find his way to the center of American power and convince the government to acknowledge his people's humanity and capacity for citizenship. Although his words echoed the very ideas about liberty and equality that Howard had championed during Reconstruction, in the summer of 1877 the general and his troops ruthlessly pursued hundreds of Nez Perce families through the stark and unforgiving Northern Rockies. An odyssey and a tragedy, their devastating war transfixed the nation and immortalized Chief Joseph as a hero to generations of Americans. Recreating the Nez Perce War through the voices of its survivors, Daniel J. Sharfstein's visionary history of the West casts Howard's turn away from civil rights alongside the nation's rejection of racial equality and embrace of empire. The conflict becomes a pivotal struggle over who gets to claim the American dream: a battle of ideas about the meaning of freedom and equality, the mechanics of American power, and the limits of what the government can and should do for its people. The war that Howard and Joseph fought is one that Americans continue to fight today.
Call Number: General Collection, E83.877 .S49 2017Publication Date: 2017 -
Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War
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A compelling and original recovery of Native American resistance and adaptation to colonial America With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the "First Indian War" (later named King Philip's War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks's pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England, reading the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history.
Call Number: General Collection, E83.67 .B795 2018Publication Date: 2018 -
New Mexico and the Pimería Alta: The Colonial Period in the American Southwest
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Winner of the 2017 Arizona Literary Award for Published Nonfiction Focusing on the two major areas of the Southwest that witnessed the most intensive and sustained colonial encounters, New Mexico and the Pimería Alta compares how different forms of colonialism and indigenous political economies resulted in diverse outcomes for colonists and Native peoples. Taking a holistic approach and studying both colonist and indigenous perspectives through archaeological, ethnohistorical, historical, and landscape data, contributors examine how the processes of colonialism played out in the American Southwest. Although these broad areas--New Mexico and southern Arizona/northern Sonora--share a similar early colonial history, the particular combination of players, sociohistorical trajectories, and social relations within each area led to, and were transformed by, markedly diverse colonial encounters. Understanding these different mixes of players, history, and social relations provides the foundation for conceptualizing the enormous changes wrought by colonialism throughout the region. The presentations of different cultural trajectories also offer important avenues for future thought and discussion on the strategies for missionization and colonialism. The case studies tackle how cultures evolved in the light of radical transformations in cultural traits or traditions and how different groups reconciled to this change. A much needed up-to-date examination of the colonial era in the Southwest, New Mexico and the Pimería Alta demonstrates the intertwined relationships between cultural continuity and transformation during a time of immense change and highlights contemporary thought on the colonial experience. Contributors: Joseph Aguilar, Jimmy Arterberry, Heather Atherton, Dale Brenneman, J. Andrew Darling, John G. Douglass, B. Sunday Eiselt, Severin Fowles, William M. Graves, Lauren Jelinek, Kelly L. Jenks, Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa, Phillip O. Leckman, Matthew Liebmann, Kent G. Lightfoot, Lindsay Montgomery, Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman, Robert Preucel, Matthew Schmader, Thomas E. Sheridan, Colleen Strawhacker, J. Homer Thiel, David Hurst Thomas, Laurie D. Webster
Call Number: ONLINEPublication Date: 2017 -
Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories: Native American Women's Autobiography
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In Sovereign Stories, Annette Angela Portillo examines Native American women's autobiographical discourses and multiple-voiced life stories that resist generic conventional notions of first-person narrative. She argues that these "sovereign stories" and "blood memories" not only reveal the multilayered histories and identities shared by each author, but demonstrate how their narratives are grounded in ancestral memory and land. These autobiographies recall settler-colonialism, deterritorialization, and genocide as the writers and activist-scholars reclaim their voices across cultural, national, and digital boundaries. Portillo provides close readings of memoirs, life stories, oral histories, blogs, social media sites, and experimental multigenre narratives including those by Delfina Cuero, Ruby Modesto, Leslie Marmon Silko, Pretty-Shield, Zitkala-Sa, and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins.
Call Number: General Collection, E89.5 .P67 2017Publication Date: 2017 -
Through an Indian's Looking Glass
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The life of William Apess (1798--1839), a Pequot Indian, Methodist preacher, and widely celebrated writer, provides a lens through which to comprehend the complex dynamics of indigenous survival and resistance in the era of America's early nationhood. Apess's life intersects with multiple aspects of indigenous identity and existence in this period, including indentured servitude, slavery, service in the armed forces, syncretic engagements with Christian spirituality, and Native struggles for political and cultural autonomy. Even more, Apess offers a powerful and provocative voice for the persistence of Native presence in a time and place that was long supposed to have settled its "Indian question" in favor of extinction. Through meticulous archival research, close readings of Apess's key works, and informed and imaginative speculation about his largely enigmatic life, Drew Lopenzina provides a vivid portrait of this singular Native American figure. This new biography will sit alongside Apess's own writing as vital reading for those interested in early America and indigeneity.
Call Number: General Collection, E99.P53 L67 2017Publication Date: 2017 -
White Birch, Red Hawthorn
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"This is conquered land." The Dakota woman's words, spoken at a community meeting in St. Paul, struck Nora Murphy forcefully. Her own Irish great-great grandparents, fleeing the potato famine, had laid claim to 160 acres in a virgin maple grove in Minnesota. That her dispossessed ancestors' homestead, The Maples, was built upon another, far more brutal dispossession is the hard truth underlying White Birch, Red Hawthorn, a memoir of Murphy's search for the deeper connections between this contested land and the communities who call it home.In twelve essays, each dedicated to a tree significant to Minnesota, Murphy tells the story of the grove that, long before the Irish arrived, was home to three Native tribes: the Dakota, Ojibwe, and Ho-Chunk. She notes devastating strategies employed by the U.S. government to wrest the land from the tribes, but also revisits iconic American tales that subtly continue to promote this displacement--the Thanksgiving story, the Paul Bunyan myth, and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. Murphy travels to Ireland to search out another narrative long hidden--that of her great-great-grandmother's transformative journey from North Tipperary to The Maples.In retrieving these stories, White Birch, Red Hawthorn uncovers lingering wounds of the past--and the possibility that, through connection to this suffering, healing can follow. The next step is simple, Murphy tells us: listen.
Call Number: General Collection, E78.M7 M87 2017Publication Date: 2017 -
An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873
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The first full account of the government-sanctioned genocide of California Indians under United States rule Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide. Madley describes pre-contact California and precursors to the genocide before explaining how the Gold Rush stirred vigilante violence against California Indians. He narrates the rise of a state-sanctioned killing machine and the broad societal, judicial, and political support for genocide. Many participated: vigilantes, volunteer state militiamen, U.S. Army soldiers, U.S. congressmen, California governors, and others. The state and federal governments spent at least $1,700,000 on campaigns against California Indians. Besides evaluating government officials' culpability, Madley considers why the slaughter constituted genocide and how other possible genocides within and beyond the Americas might be investigated using the methods presented in this groundbreaking book.
Call Number: General Collection, E78.C15 M33 2016Publication Date: 2016
Primary sources online
For primary sources from and about Native American History, you should try the resources and strategies listed on this guide's "Primary Sources" page. However, the databases, collections, and recent books below might be of particular interest to those researching Native American History.
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The Life of Ten Bears
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The Life of Ten Bears is a remarkable collection of nineteenth-century Comanche oral histories given by Francis Joseph "Joe A" Attocknie. Although various elements of Ten Bears's life (ca. 1790-1872) are widely known, including several versions of how the toddler Ten Bears survived the massacre of his family, other parts have not been as widely publicized, remaining instead in the collective memory of his descendants. Other narratives in this collection reference lesser-known family members. These narratives are about the historical episodes that Attocknie's family thought were worth remembering and add a unique perspective on Comanche society and tradition as experienced through several generations of his family. Kavanagh's introduction adds context to the personal narratives by discussing the process of transmission. These narratives serve multiple purposes for Comanche families and communities. Some autobiographical accounts, "recounting" brave deeds and war honors, function as validation of status claims, while others illustrate the giving of names; still others recall humorous situations, song-ridicules, slapstick, and tragedies. Such family oral histories quickly transcend specific people and events by restoring key voices to the larger historical narrative of the American West.
Call Number: ONLINEPublication Date: 2016 -
Washakie Letters of Willie Ottogary
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Writings by American Indians from the early twentieth century or earlier are rare. Willie Ottogary's letters have the distinction of being firsthand reports of an Indian community's ongoing social life by a community member and leader. The Northwestern Shoshone residing at the Washakie colony in northern Utah descended from survivors of the Bear River Massacre. Most had converted to the Mormon Church and remained in northern Utah rather than moving to a federal Indian reservation. For over twenty years, local newspapers in Utah and southern Idaho regularly published letters from Ottogary reporting happenings-personal milestones and health crises, comings and goings, social events, economic conditions and activities, efforts at political redress-at Washakie and other Shoshone communities in the intermountain West. Matthew Kreitzer compiled and edited the letters of Ottogary and added historical commentary and appendices, biographical data on individuals Ottogary mentioned, and eighty-five rare historical photographs. Written in a vernacular English and printed unedited in the newspapers, the letters describe a society in cultural transition and present Ottogary's distinctively Shoshone point of view on anything affecting his people. Thus, they provide an unusual picture of Shoshone life through a critical period, a time when many Indian communities reached a historical nadir. While the letters unflinchingly report the many difficulties and challenges the Shoshone faced, they portray a vital and dynamic society, whose members led full lives and actively pursued their own interests. Ottogary lobbied constantly for Shoshone rights, forging alliances with Shoshone throughout the region, visiting Washington D.C., advocating legislation, and participating in Goshute-Western Shoshone draft resistance during World War I.
Call Number: ONLINEPublication Date: 2000 -
Lakotas, Black Robes, and Holy Women
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Lakotas, Black Robes, and Holy Women makes available in English a rare collection of eyewitness accounts by German Catholic missionaries among the Lakotas in the late nineteenth century. German missionaries played an important role in the early years of the St. Francis mission on the Rosebud Reservation, and the Holy Rosary mission on the Pine Ridge Reservation, both in South Dakota. Although the accounts reflect the dominant perspective and attitude of missionaries and white teachers in the period of assimilation policy, they also offer firsthand accounts of the Lakotas in the early reservation years by Jesuits who saw themselves as friends and defenders of the Indians against a government policy they considered inappropriate and harmful. During the watershed years of 1886-1900, the German missionaries witnessed and participated in key events in the history of the American West, including the Ghost Dance, the Wounded Knee massacre, the Drexel Mission fight, the repression of Lakota rituals, and the growing importance of Catholicism for many Lakotas. The volume also describes the role of women in the mission and the process of converting and schooling Lakotas.
Call Number: ONLINEPublication Date: 2007
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Willing to Serve: American Indians (Library of Congress) Native Americans narrate their personal experiences serving in conflicts from World War II to Iraq in audio and video interviews collected by the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project.
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American Indian Boarding Schools (Digital Public Library of America) This collection of photos and documents shows what life was like for the many children enrolled in American Indian boarding schools.
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The American Indian Movement, 1968-1978 (Digital Public Library of America) This primary source set uses documents, photographs, videos, and news stories to tell the story of the first decade of the American Indian Movement.
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American Indians of the Pacific Northwest Collection (University of Washington) This site provides an extensive digital collection of original photographs and documents about the Northwest Coast and Plateau Indian cultures, complemented by essays written by anthropologists, historians, and teachers about both particular tribes and cross-cultural topics.
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Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center (Dickinson College) The Carlisle Indian Industrial School is a major site of memory for many Native peoples, as well as a source of study for students and scholars around the globe. This website represents an effort to aid the research process by bringing together, in digital format, a variety of resources that are physically preserved in various locations around the country.
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Cross-Cultural Colonial Conflicts (Digital Public Library of America) By exploring cross-cultural colonial conflicts between European and Native populations through the lenses of chronology, politics, religion, and society, we can understand the breakdown of fledgling alliances and the impact of colonialist expansion on the Native American way of life.
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The Wounded Knee Massacre (Digital Public Library of America) This primary source set uses documents, photographs, government records, and news reporting to explore the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee and its historical impact.
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The Duke Collection of American Indian Oral History (University of Oklahoma) The Duke Collection of American Indian Oral History online provides access to typescripts of interviews (1967 -1972) conducted with hundreds of Indians in Oklahoma regarding the histories and cultures of their respective nations and tribes.
Primary sources in physical book format
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Treaties with American Indians
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This invaluable reference reveals the long, often contentious history of Native American treaties, providing a rich overview of a topic of continuing importance. * Over 300 A-Z entries covering important treaties such as the Treaty of 1778, U.S. and Indian leaders such as Chief Justice John Marshall and Red Cloud of the Sioux, and legal decisions such as Worcester v. Georgia * 16 in-depth thematic essays providing both government and Indian perspectives on major issues, plus six essays looking at U.S.-Indian relations region by region * A complete chronology of the major events that shaped the history of Native American treaty-making * Over 100 contributors who are distinguished scholars in their field, such as Carole Greenberg and R. David Edmunds * Photographs of significant individuals, treaty sites, and artifacts
Call Number: General Collection, KF8203.6 .T74 2008Publication Date: 2007 -
The Death of Crazy Horse
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On May 7, 1877, less than a year after his overwhelming victory at Little Big Horn, Crazy Horse, the charismatic Oglala Sioux whose name had become the epitome of Indian resistance to white encroachment, surrendered at Camp Robinson, Nebraska Territory. A young man of slight build and quiet ways dramatically at odds with his extraordinary influence and stature, he was viewed by the military as a potential civil leader of all Sioux. What happened between May 15, 1877, when, anticipating a visit to the president in Washington, Crazy Horse was sworn in as a noncommissioned officer in the U.S. military, and September 5, 1877, when he was bayoneted in the back by a military guard, is the stuff of rumor and legend. And yet, reliable accounts of the last days of Crazy Horse do exist. The interviews collected in this book describe in stark detail the surrender and death of Crazy Horse from the perspective of Indian and mixed-blood contemporaries. Supplemented by military orders, telegrams, and reports, and rounded out with dispatches from numerous newspaper correspondents, these eyewitness accounts make up a unique firsthand view of the events and circumstances surrounding this tragic episode in Lakota history.
Call Number: General Collection, E99.O3 D4 2001Publication Date: 2001 -
First Peoples
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First Peoplesdistinctive approach to American Indian history has earned praise and admiration from its users. Created to fill the significant need for a survey text that acknowledges the diversity of Native peoples, respected scholar Colin G. Calloway provides a solid course foundation that still allows instructors to emphasize selected topics of interest to them and their students. The signature format ofFirst Peoplesstrikes the ideal balance between primary and secondary source material, combining narrative, written documents, and visual documents in each chapter.
Call Number: General Collection, E77 .C14 2008Publication Date: 2007 -
Native American Testimony
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From the author of How the World Moves--the classic collection of more than 500 years of Native American History In a series of powerful and moving documents, anthropologist Peter Nabokov presents a history of Native American and white relations as seen though Indian eyes and told through Indian voices. Beginning with the Indians' first encounters with European explorers, traders, missionaries, settlers, and soldiers to the challenges confronting Native American culture today, Native American Testimony spans five hundred years of interchange between the two peoples. Drawing from a wide range of sources--traditional narratives, Indian autobiographies, government transcripts, firsthand interviews, and more--Nabokov has assembled a remarkably rich and vivid collection, representing nothing less than an alternate history of North America.
Call Number: General Collection, E93 .N3 1999Publication Date: 1999
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The World Turned Upside Down
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This unique collection presents Native American perspectives on the events of the colonial era, from the first encounters between Indians and Europeans in the early seventeenth century through the American Revolution in the late eighteenth century. The documents collected here are drawn from letters, speeches, and records of treaty negotiations in which Indians addressed settlers. Colin Calloway's introduction discusses the nature of such sources and the problems of interpreting them and also analyzes the forces of change that were creating a "new world" for Native Americans during the colonial period. An overview introduces each chapter, and a headnote to each document comments on its context and significance. Maps, illustrations, a bibliography, and an index are also included.
Call Number: General Collection, E77.6 .W89 1994Publication Date: 1994 -
Our Hearts Fell to the Ground
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"This unique anthology chronicles the Plains Indians' struggle to maintain their traditional way of life in the changing world of the nineteenth century. Its rich variety of 34 primary sources - including narratives, myths, speeches, and transcribed oral histories - gives students the rare opportunity to view the transformation of the West from Native American perspective. Calloway's comprehensive introduction offers crucial information on western expansion, territorial struggles among Indian tribes, the slaughter of the buffalo, and forced assimilation through the reservation system. More than 30 pieces of Plains Indian art are included, along with maps, headnotes, questions for consideration, a bibliography, a chronology, and an index."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Call Number: General Collection, E78.G73 O97 1996Publication Date: 1996 -
Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press
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2018 Outstanding Academic Title, selected by Choice Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press is the first comprehensive collection of writings by students and well-known Native American authors who published in boarding school newspapers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Students used their acquired literacy in English along with more concrete tools that the boarding schools made available, such as printing technology, to create identities for themselves as editors and writers. In these roles they sought to challenge Native American stereotypes and share issues of importance to their communities. Writings by Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), Charles Eastman, and Luther Standing Bear are paired with the works of lesser-known writers to reveal parallels and points of contrast between students and generations. Drawing works primarily from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (Pennsylvania), the Hampton Institute (Virginia), and the Seneca Indian School (Oklahoma), Jacqueline Emery illustrates how the boarding school presses were used for numerous and competing purposes. While some student writings appear to reflect the assimilationist agenda, others provide more critical perspectives on the schools' agendas and the dominant culture. This collection of Native-authored letters, editorials, essays, short fiction, and retold tales published in boarding school newspapers illuminates the boarding school legacy and how it has shaped, and continues to shape, Native American literary production.
Call Number: General Collection, PS508.I5 R37 2017Publication Date: 2017
