front cover of After the Bloodbath
After the Bloodbath
Is Healing Possible in the Wake of Rampage Shootings?
James D. Diamond
Michigan State University Press, 2019
As violence in the United States seems to become increasingly more commonplace, the question of how communities reset after unprecedented violence also grows in significance. After the Bloodbath examines this quandary, producing insights linking rampage shootings and communal responses in the United States. Diamond, who was a leading attorney in the community where the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy occurred, focuses on three well-known shootings and a fourth shooting that occurred on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. The book looks to the roots of Indigenous approaches to crime, identifying an institutional weakness in the Anglo judicial model, and explores adapting Indigenous practices that contribute to healing following heinous criminal behavior. Emerging from the history of Indigenous dispute resolution is a spotlight turned on to restorative justice, a subject no author has discussed to date in the context of mass shootings. Diamond ultimately leads the reader to a positive road forward focusing on insightful steps people can take after a rampage shooting to help their wounded communities heal.
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All Coyote's Children
Bette Lynch Husted
Oregon State University Press, 2018
Jack and Annie Fallon had been living what seemed the ideal life with their son Riley, spending the school year in Portland, where Jack was a professor of Native American history, and summers at Jack’s family ranch in northeastern Oregon, on land surrounded by the Umatilla Indian Reservation. But a good way of life can disappear almost overnight, as the Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla peoples already know. Now the teenage Riley is in rehab, Jack has disappeared without a trace into the remote wilderness, and Annie is recovering from her own hospitalization following a mental health crisis.

Still fragile, a bereft Annie returns to the ranch, where she is befriended by Leona, a Umatilla-Cayuse neighbor. Leona, as it turns out, has a long connection to the family that even Jack never knew about. At the time of his disappearance, Jack had been grappling with his family’s legacy—with the conflicts and consequences of white settlement of native ground. Three generations before he was born, the family ranch was taken from the Umatilla reservation through the Allotment Act. Jack’s mother died when he was six, but his father’s stern presence still cast a shadow on the land.

“Survival is hard sometimes,” Leona says, but with her help, Annie is able to bring Riley home from rehab and begin the work of healing their small family, learning, season by season, how to go on living without Jack. Leona, Riley’s friends Alex and Mattie, and old neighbors Gus and Audrey become a larger family for Annie as they share the stories that connect them—long-silenced stories from both cultures that could solve the mystery of Jack’s disappearance.

In prose that is lyrical and clear-eyed, All Coyote’s Children weaves an unforgettable tale of cultures and families caught in the inescapable web of who they are and what they have inherited.
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Along the Journey River
A Mystery
Carole laFavor
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Several sacred artifacts have gone missing from the Minnesota Red Earth Reservation and the suspect list is continuously growing. While it could be the racists from the bordering town, or a young man struggling with problems at home, or the county coroner and his cronies, the need for answers and apprehending the culprit is amplified when Jed Morriseau, the Tribal Chairman, is murdered. Investigating these mysterious occurrences because of tribal traditions and the honor of her family, Renee LaRoche works to track down the people responsible. But can she maintain her intense investigation as well as her new relationship with Samantha Salisbury, the visiting women’s studies professor at the white college nearby? Renee is caught between the traditions of her tribe and efforts to help her chimook lover accept their cultural differences. 

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American Indian Educators in Reservation Schools
Terry Huffman
University of Nevada Press, 2014
The role of Native American teachers and administrators working in reservation schools has received little attention from scholars. Utilizing numerous interviews and extensive fieldwork, Terry Huffman shows how they define their roles and judge their achievements. He examines the ways they address the complex issues of cultural identity that affect their students and themselves and how they cope with the pressures of teaching disadvantaged students while meeting the requirements for reservation schools. Personal accounts from the educators enrich the discussion. Their candid comments about their choice of profession; their position as teachers, role models, and social service agents; and the sometimes harsh realities of reservation life offer unique insight into the challenges and rewards of providing an education to Native American students. Huffman also considers the changing role of Native educators as reservation schools prepare their students for the increasing complexities of modern life and society while still transmitting traditional culture. He shows that Native American educators meet daunting challenges with enduring optimism and persistence. The insights these educators offer can serve those in other communities where students navigate a difficult path out of discrimination and poverty.
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The Army and the Navajo
The Bosque Redondo Reservation Experiment, 1863-1868
Gerald Thompson
University of Arizona Press, 1976

logo for University of Manitoba Press
The Community Apart
A Case Study of a Canadian Indian Reserve Community
Yngve Georg Lithman
University of Manitoba Press, 1984

front cover of Evil Dead Center
Evil Dead Center
A Mystery
Carole laFavor
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

An Ojibwa woman has been found dead on the outskirts of the Minnesota Red Earth Reservation. The coroner ruled the death a suicide, but after an ex-lover comes back into her life saying foul play was involved, Renee LaRoche wants to prove otherwise. As the events begin to unfold, Renee conducts a presumably normal welfare check on a young Ojibwa boy in foster care. After she learns the boy has suffered abuse, Renee finds herself amid an investigation into the foster care system and the deep trauma it has inflicted on the Ojibwa people. As Renee uncovers horrible truths, she must work through her own childhood issues to help shine a light on the dark web she has stumbled into.

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front cover of Great Lakes Indian Accommodation and Resistance during the Early Reservation Years, 1850-1900
Great Lakes Indian Accommodation and Resistance during the Early Reservation Years, 1850-1900
Edmund Jefferson Danziger, Jr.
University of Michigan Press, 2009

During the four decades following the War of 1812, Great Lakes Indians were forced to surrender most of their ancestral homelands and begin refashioning their lives on reservations. The challenges Indians faced during this period could not have been greater. By century's end, settlers, frontier developers, and federal bureaucrats possessed not only economic and political power but also the bulk of the region's resources. It is little wonder that policymakers in Washington and Ottawa alike anticipated the disappearance of distinctive Indian communities within a single generation. However, these predictions have proved false as Great Lakes Indian communities, though assaulted on both sides of the international border to this day, have survived. Danziger's lively and insightful book documents the story of these Great Lakes Indians---a study not of victimization but of how Aboriginal communities and their leaders have determined their own destinies and preserved core values, lands, and identities against all odds and despite ongoing marginalization.

Utilizing eyewitness accounts from the 1800s and an innovative, cross-national approach, Danziger explores not only how Native Americans adapted to their new circumstances---including attempts at horse and plow agriculture, the impact of reservation allotment, and the response to Christian evangelists---but also the ways in which the astute and resourceful Great Lakes chiefs, councils, and clan mothers fought to protect their homeland and preserve the identity of their people. Through their efforts, dreams of economic self-sufficiency and self-determination as well as the historic right to unimpeded border crossings---from one end of the Great Lakes basin to the other---were kept alive.

Edmund Jefferson Danziger, Jr., is a Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of History at Bowling Green State University. Danziger is well known among historians and anthropologists for his interpretive histories of Great Lakes Native Americans.

Photo of girls at Lac du Flambeau School courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society, image 55938; photo of Ojibwa farm family at Garden River Reservation courtesy Archives of Ontario, image S 16361.

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front cover of I Won't Stay Indian, I'll Keep Studying
I Won't Stay Indian, I'll Keep Studying
Race, Place, and Discrimination in a Costa Rican High School
Karen Stocker
University Press of Colorado, 2005
While teaching and researching on an indigenous reservation in Costa Rica, Karen Stocker discovered that for Native students who attended the high school outside the reservation, two extreme reactions existed to the predominantly racist high school environment. While some maintained their indigenous identity and did poorly in school, others succeeded academically, but rejected their Indianness and the reservation. Between these two poles lay a whole host of responses. In "I Won't Stay Indian, I'll Keep Studying," Stocker addresses the institutionalized barriers these students faced and explores the interaction between education and identity.

Stocker reveals how overt and hidden curricula taught ethnic, racial, and gendered identities and how the dominant ideology of the town, present in school, conveyed racist messages to students.

"I Won't Stay Indian, I'll Keep Studying" documents how students from the reservation reacted to, coped with, and resisted discrimination. Considering the students' experiences in the context of the Costa Rican educational system as a whole, Stocker discusses policy shifts that might reduce institutionalized discrimination. Her interpretation of the experiences of these students makes a significant contribution to anthropology, Latin American studies, critical race theory, and educational theory.

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Indian Reservations in the United States
Territory, Sovereignty, and Socioeconomic Change
Klaus Frantz
University of Chicago Press, 1999
In the most comprehensive and detailed cultural-geographic study ever conducted of the American Indian reservations in the forty-eight contiguous states, Klaus Frantz explores the reservations as living environments rather than historical footnotes. Although this study provides well-researched documentation of the generally deplorable living conditions on the reservations, it also seeks to discover and highlight the many possibilities for positive change.

Informed by both historical research and extensive fieldwork, this book pays special attention to the natural resource base and economic outlook of the reservations, as well as the crucial issue of tribal sovereignty. Chapters also cover the demography of American Indian groups and their socioeconomic status (including standard of living, employment, and education). A new afterword treats some of the developments since the book's initial publication in German, such as the effects of the 1988 Indian gaming law that allowed Indian reservations to operate gambling establishments (with mixed success).

"Provides a good overview of the basic questions and problems facing reservation Indians today."—Peter Bolz, Journal of American History (on the German edition)
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front cover of The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century
The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century
American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources
Donald Fixico
University Press of Colorado, 1998
The struggle between Indians and whites for land did not end on the battlefields in the 1800s. When this hostile era closed with Native Americans forced onto reservations, no one expected that rich natural resources lay beneath these lands that white America would desperately desire. Yet oil, timber, fish, coal, water, and other resources were discovered to be in great demand in the mainstream market, and a new war began with Indian tribes and their leaders trying to protect their tribal natural resources throughout the twentieth century.

In The Invasion of Indian Country in the 20th Century, Donald Fixico details the course of this struggle, providing a wealth of information on the resources possessed by individual tribes and the way in which they were systematically defrauded and stripped of these resources. Fixico contends that federal policies originally devised to protect Indian interests ironically worked against the Indian nations as the tribes employed new tactics with the Council of Energy Resources Tribes, using the law in courts and applying aggressive business leadership to combat the capitalist invasion by mainstream America.

Fixico's analysis of this war being waged throughout the century and today serves as an indispensable reference tool for anyone interested in Native American history and current government policy with regard to Indian lands.

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front cover of The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century
The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century
American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources, Second Edition
Donald Fixico
University Press of Colorado, 2012
The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century, Second Edition is updated through the first decade of the twenty-first century and contains a new chapter challenging Americans--Indian and non-Indian--to begin healing the earth. This analysis of the struggle to protect not only natural resources but also a way of life serves as an indispensable tool for students or anyone interested in Native American history and current government policy with regard to Indian lands or the environment.
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Rim Country Exodus
A Story of Conquest, Renewal, and Race in the Making
Daniel J. Herman
University of Arizona Press, 2012

Winner Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award

For thousands of years, humans have lived on the sprawling escarpment in Arizona known as the Mogollon Rim, a stretch that separates the valleys of central Arizona from the mountains of the north. A vast portion of this dramatic landscape is the traditional home of the Dilzhe’e (Tonto Apache) and the Yavapai. Now Daniel Herman offers a compelling narrative of how—from 1864 to 1934—the Dilzhe’e and the Yavapai came to central Arizona, how they were conquered, how they were exiled, how they returned to their homeland, and how, through these events, they found renewal.

Herman examines the complex, contradictory, and very human relations between Indians, settlers, and Federal agents in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arizona—a time that included Arizona’s brutal Indian wars. But while most tribal histories stay within the borders of the reservation, Herman also chronicles how Indians who left the reservation helped build a modern state with dams, hydroelectricity, roads, and bridges. With thoughtful detail and incisive analysis, Herman discusses the complex web of interactions between Apache, Yavapai, and Anglos that surround every aspect of the story.

Rim Country Exodus is part of a new movement in Western history emphasizing survival rather than disappearance. Just as important, this is one of the first in-depth studies of the West that examines race as it was lived. Race was formulated, Herman argues, not only through colonial and scientific discourses, but also through day-to-day interactions between Indians, agents, and settlers. Rim Country Exodus offers an important new perspective on the making of the West.

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front cover of State and Reservation
State and Reservation
New Perspectives on Federal Indian Policy
Edited by George Pierre Castile and Robert L. Bee
University of Arizona Press, 1992
Ten original essays focus on the rise, change, and persistence of the Native American reservation system. Contributors drawn from history, anthropology, sociology, and political science offer divergent points of view buttressed by historical and ethnographic case studies. Together, these articles suggest that the time has come—or is long overdue—to rethink the basic assumptions underlying Federal Indian policy.

CONTENTS
Introduction, George Pierre Castile & Robert L. Bee
Part I—Historical Foundations of the Reservation System
An Elusive Institution: The Meanings of Indian Reservations in Gold Rush California, John M. Findlay
Crow Leadership Amidst Reservation Oppression, Frederick E. Hoxie
Part II—The Nonreservation Experience
Utah Indians and the Homestead Laws, Martha C. Knack
The Enduring Reservations of Oklahoma, John H. Moore
Without Reservation: Federal Indian Policy and the Landless Tribes of Washington, Frank W. Porter, III
Part III—Power and Symbols
Riding the Paper Tiger, Robert L. Bee
Indian Sign: Hegemony and Symbolism in Federal Indian Policy, George P. Castile
Part IV—The Resource Base
Primitive Accumulation, Reservations, and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Lawrence Weiss & David C.Maas
Shortcomings of the Indian Self-Determination Policy, George S. Esber, Jr.
Getting to Yes in the New West: The Negotiation of Policy, Thomas R. McGuire
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Tribal Government Today, Revised Edition
James J. Lopach
University Press of Colorado, 1998
An account of Fourth World peoples within a First World nation, Tribal Government Today, Revised Edition, is a critical analysis of the contemporary progress of Indian tribes toward self-government and economic sufficiency. Focusing on seven reservations in Montana representing the diverse opportunities and problems facing Indian tribes in the West, this book approaches tribal government from the twin perspectives of reservation politics and the legal context within which reservation conflicts must be solved.
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Tribal Policing
Asserting Sovereignty, Seeking Justice
Eileen Luna-Firebaugh
University of Arizona Press, 2007
What does it mean to be a tribal police officer? What are the complexities of that role? And how do tribal communities, tribal police departments, and other law enforcement agencies collaborate to address the alarmingly high rate of violent crime in Indian country?

Author Eileen Luna-Firebaugh answers these and other questions in this well-documented text about tribal government and law enforcement in America. Based on extensive research with tribal police departments conducted over a period of eight years, Tribal Policing reveals the complicated role of police officials in Indian country and the innovative methods they are developing to address crime within their borders and to advance tribal sovereignty in the United States.

Tribal police departments face many challenges, such as heightened crime rates, a lack of resources (working patrol vehicles, 911 systems, access to police radios), and vast patrol areas. Luna-Firebaugh demonstrates that tribal officers see themselves as members of the tribal community and that tribal law enforcement is a complex balance of tribal position and authority within the community. Among other topics, Luna-Firebaugh analyzes the structure of tribal law enforcement and the ways it differs from mainstream policing; the role of women, tribal members, and others who comprise tribal law enforcement personnel; tribal jails and corrections; police training; and the legal, political, cultural, and historical issues that affect American Indian tribal policing.

This informative text addresses the scarcity of published material regarding tribal law enforcement and will be a welcome addition to courses in criminal justice, the administration of justice, law enforcement, and Native American studies.
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front cover of Tribal Strengths and Native Education
Tribal Strengths and Native Education
Voices from the Reservation Classroom
Terry Huffman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
In 1889, Sitting Bull addressed the formal, Western-style education of his people. "When you find something good in the white man's road, pick it up," he intoned. "When you find something that is bad . . . leave it alone. We shall master his machinery, and his inventions, his skills, his medicine, his planning, but we will retain our beauty and still be Indians."

Sitting Bull's vision—that cultural survival and personal perseverance derive from tribal resilience—lies at the heart of Tribal Strengths and Native Education. Basing his account on the insights of six veteran American Indian educators who serve in three reservation schools on the Northern Plains, Terry Huffman explores how Native educators perceive pedagogical strengths rooted in their tribal heritage and personal ethnicity. He recounts their views on the issues facing students and shows how tribal identity can be a source of resilience in academic and personal success. Throughout, Huffman and the educators emphasize the importance of anchoring the formal education of Indian children in Native values and worldviews—in "tribal strengths."
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