At the turn of the last millennium, a powerful Native American civilization emerged and flourished in the American Midwest. By A.D. 1050 the population of its capital city, Cahokia, was larger than that of London. Without the use of the wheel, beasts of burden, or metallurgy, its technology was of the Stone Age, yet its culture fostered widespread commerce, refined artistic expression, and monumental architecture. The model for this urbane world was nothing less than the cosmos itself. The climax of their ritual center was a four-tiered pyramid covering fourteen acre rising a hundred feet into the sky—the tallest structure in the United States until 1867. This beautifully illustrated book traces the history of this six-square-mile area in the central Mississippi Valley from the Big Bang to the present.

Chappell seeks to answer fundamental questions about this unique, yet still relatively unknown space, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982. How did this swampy land become so amenable to human life? Who were the remarkable people who lived here before the Europeans came? Why did the whole civilization disappear so rapidly? What became of the land in the centuries after the Mississippians abandoned it? And finally, what can we learn about ourselves as we look into the changing meaning of Cahokia through the ages?

To explore these questions, Chappell probes a wide range of sources, including the work of astronomers, geographers, geologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Archival photographs and newspaper accounts, as well as interviews with those who work at the site and Native Americans on their annual pilgrimage to the site, bring the story up to the present.
Tying together these many threads, Chappell weaves a rich tale of how different people conferred their values on the same piece of land and how the transformed landscape, in turn, inspired different values in them-cultural, spiritual, agricultural, economic, and humanistic.

On February 29, 1704, a party of French and Indian raiders descended on the Massachusetts village of Deerfield, killing fifty residents and capturing more than a hundred others. In this masterful work of history, Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney reexamine the Deerfield attack and place it within a framework stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. Drawing on previously untapped sources, they show how the assault grew out of the aspirations of New England family farmers, the ambitions of Canadian colonists, the calculations of French officials, the fears of Abenaki warriors, and the grief of Mohawk women as they all struggled to survive the ongoing confrontation of empires and cultures.

Haefeli and Sweeney reconstruct events from multiple points of view, through the stories of a variety of individuals involved. These stories begin in the Native, French, and English communities of the colonial Northeast, then converge in the February 29 raid, as a force of more than two hundred Frenchmen, Abenakis, Hurons, Kahnawake Mohawks, Pennacooks, and Iroquois of the Mountain overran the northwesternmost village of the New England frontier. Although the inhabitants put up more of a fight than earlier accounts of the so-called Deerfield Massacre have suggested, the attackers took 112 men, women, and children captive. The book follows the raiders and their prisoners on the harsh three-hundred-mile trek back to Canada and into French and Native communities. Along the way the authors examine how captives and captors negotiated cultural boundaries and responded to the claims of competing faiths and empires—all against a backdrop of continuing warfare.

By giving equal weight to all participants, Haefeli and Sweeney range across the fields of social, political, literary, religious, and military history, and reveal connections between cultures and histories usually seen as separate.

Can a critical examination of Indigenous masculinities be an honor song—one that celebrates, rather than pathologizes; one that seeks diversity and strength; one that overturns heteropatriarchy without centering settler colonialism? Can a critical examination of Indigenous masculinities even be creative, inclusive, erotic?

Sam McKegney answers affirmatively. Countering the perception that masculinity has been so contaminated as to be irredeemable, the book explores Indigenous literary art for understandings of masculinity that exceed the impoverished inheritance of colonialism.

Carrying the Burden of Peace weaves together stories of Indigenous life, love, eroticism, pain, and joy to map the contours of diverse, empowered, and non-dominant Indigenous masculinities. It is from here that a more balanced world may be pursued.
 

Ever since a Native American prepared a paper "charte" of the lower Colorado River for the Spaniard Hernando de Alarcón in 1540, Native Americans have been making maps in the course of encounters with whites. This book charts the history of these cartographic encounters, examining native maps and mapmaking from the pre- and post-contact periods.

G. Malcolm Lewis provides accessible and detailed overviews of the history of native North American maps, mapmaking, and scholarly interest in these topics. Other contributions include a study of colonial Aztec cartography that highlights the connections among maps, space, and history; an account of the importance of native maps as archaeological evidence; and an interpretation of an early-contact-period hide painting of an actual encounter involving whites and two groups of warring natives.

Although few original native maps have survived, contemporary copies and accounts of mapmaking form a rich resource for anyone interested in the history of Native American encounters or the history of cartography and geography.

“Ceremonial time” occurs when past, present, and future can be perceived simultaneously. Experienced only rarely, usually during ritual dance, this escape from linear time is the vehicle for John Mitchell’s extraordinary writing. In this, his most magical book, he traces the life of a single square mile in New England, from the last ice age through years of human history, including bear shamans, colonists, witches, local farmers, and encroaching industrial “parks.”

After a century of archaeological research in the Southeastern United States, there are still areas about which little is known. Surprisingly, one of these areas in the Appalachian Summit, which in historic times was inhabited by the Cherokee people whose rich culture and wide influence made their name commonplace in typifying Southeastern Indians. The culture of the people who preceded the historic Cherokees was no less rich, and their network of relationships with other groups no less wide. Until recently, however, the prehistoric cultural remains of the Southern Appalachians had received only slight attention.

Archaeological sites in the Appalachians usually do not stand out dramatically on the landscape as do the effigy mounds of the Ohio Valley and the massive platform mounds of the Southeastern Piedmont and Mississippi Valley. Prehistoric settlements in the Southern Appalachians lay in the bottomlands along the clear, rocky rivers, hidden in the folds of the mountains. Finding and investigating these sites required a systematic approach. From 1964 to 1971, under the direction of Joffre L. Coe, the Research Laboratories of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, conducted an archaeological project that was designed to investigate the antecedents of the historic Cherokees in the Appalachian Summit, and included site surveys over large portions of the area and concentrated excavations at several important sites in the vicinity of the historic Cherokee Middletowns.

One result of the Cherokee project is this book, the purpose of which is to present an initial description and synthesis of a late prehistoric phase in the Appalachian Summit, a phase that lasted from the beginnings of South Appalachian Mississippian culture to the emergence of identifiable Cherokee culture. At various points Professor Dickens draws these data into the broader picture of Southeastern prehistory, and occasionally presents some interpretations of the human behavior behind the material remains, however, is to make available some new information on a previously unexplored area. Through this presentation Cherokee Prehistory helps to provide a first step to approaching, in specific ways, the problems of cultural process and systemics in the aboriginal Southeast.

Child of the Fire is the first book-length examination of the career of the nineteenth-century artist Mary Edmonia Lewis, best known for her sculptures inspired by historical and biblical themes. Throughout this richly illustrated study, Kirsten Pai Buick investigates how Lewis and her work were perceived, and their meanings manipulated, by others and the sculptor herself. She argues against the racialist art discourse that has long cast Lewis’s sculptures as reflections of her identity as an African American and Native American woman who lived most of her life abroad. Instead, by seeking to reveal Lewis’s intentions through analyses of her career and artwork, Buick illuminates Lewis’s fraught but active participation in the creation of a distinct “American” national art, one dominated by themes of indigeneity, sentimentality, gender, and race. In so doing, she shows that the sculptor variously complicated and facilitated the dominant ideologies of the vanishing American (the notion that Native Americans were a dying race), sentimentality, and true womanhood.

Buick considers the institutions and people that supported Lewis’s career—including Oberlin College, abolitionists in Boston, and American expatriates in Italy—and she explores how their agendas affected the way they perceived and described the artist. Analyzing four of Lewis’s most popular sculptures, each created between 1866 and 1876, Buick discusses interpretations of Hiawatha in terms of the cultural impact of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha; Forever Free and Hagar in the Wilderness in light of art historians’ assumptions that artworks created by African American artists necessarily reflect African American themes; and The Death of Cleopatra in relation to broader problems of reading art as a reflection of identity.

A History of Exploration for Real and Mythical Treasures in the Americas

For half a millennium, stories of vast treasures—El Dorado, Manoa, the Seven Cities of Cibola, the Lost Dutchman Mine—have been part of the lore of the Americas. Long before the Europeans set foot in the New World, myths and rumors of fabulous wealth in distant lands, such as the kingdom of Prester John, were told and retold so often that they were assumed to be true. When Spanish explorers first made contact with the Aztec and Inca civilizations, they found cultures that were literally dripping with gold. This evidence made it easy to believe the native stories of even greater wealth just beyond the horizon. In these uncharted lands, dreamers sought their fortunes: Francisco de Coronado ranged over the North American plains in search of the elusive Quivira; Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of the Incan conqueror, and Lope Aguirre, the “Wrath of God,” were both part of ill-fated expeditions in search of El Dorado; and Leonard Clark walked out of the Amazon after World War II with gold and claimed he had found that fabled kingdom.

In Cities of Gold: Legendary Kingdoms, Quixotic Quests, and Fantastic New World Wealth, Bill Yenne takes the reader from the rainforests and mountains of Peru, Paraguay, Brazil, and Guiana to the deserts and peaks of Mexico and the United States to tell the extraordinary, and often brutal story of how the search for mysterious New World riches fueled the exploration of an unknown hemisphere for hundreds of years. Even without finding the places they sought, during Spain’s “Siglo de Oro” in the sixteenth century, the Spanish plundered and mined thousands of tons of New World gold and silver and shipped it home where the reserves alone reached a staggering estimate of two trillion dollars. And it was not just the Spanish who were obsessed with gold: Sir Walter Raleigh made two government-backed voyages in search of Manoa, a golden city he was convinced was deep in Guiana. Discussing the many expeditions to find New World wealth and lost cities over a 500-year timeline, the author includes stories of lesser-known explorers and soldiers of fortune and their successes and failures. As he demonstrates, the desire for adventure and the insatiable lust for treasure motivated men and women in the past and continues to captivate fortune hunters today.

The Fernandeño Tataviam Band of California Mission Indians have lived in Southern California in the area now known as Los Angeles and Ventura Counties from time immemorial. Throughout history, these Indigenous Californians faced major challenges as colonizers moved in to harvest the resources of the California lands. Through meticulous archival research, authors Duane Champagne and Carole Goldberg trace the history of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band from the time before the Spanish arrived in the Americas to the present day.

The history of Southern California’s Indigenous communities is mapped through the story of family and their descendants, or lineages. The authors explain how politically and culturally independent lineages merged and strengthened via marriage, creating complex and enduring coalitions among Indigenous communities. The Indigenous people of Southern California faced waves of colonizers—the Spanish, then the Mexicans, followed by Americans—and their coalitions allowed them to endure to today.

Champagne and Goldberg are leading experts in Native sovereignty policies and histories. They worked in collaboration with members of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians to illustrate how the community formed and persisted. A Coalition of Lineages is not only the story of a Native Southern California community, it is also a model for multicultural tribal development for recognized and nonrecognized Indian nations in the United States and elsewhere.
 

A guide to the colonization and projected decolonization of Native America

In The Colonial Construction of Indian Country, Eric Cheyfitz mounts a pointed historical critique of colonialism through careful analysis of the dialogue between Native American literatures and federal Indian law. Illuminating how these literatures indict colonial practices, he argues that if the decolonization of Indian country is to be achieved, then federal Indian law must be erased and replaced with independent Native nation sovereignty—because subordinate sovereignty, the historical regime, is not sovereignty at all.

 

At the same time, Cheyfitz argues that Native American literatures, specifically U.S. American Indian literatures, cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of U.S. federal Indian law: the matrix of colonialism in Indian country. Providing intersectional readings of a range of literary and legal texts, he discusses such authors as Louise Erdrich, Frances Washburn, James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, and others. Cheyfitz examines how American Indian writers and critics have responded to the impact of law on Native life, revealing recent trends in Native writing that build upon traditional modes of storytelling and governance. 

 

With a focus on resistance to the colonial regime of federal Indian law, The Colonial Construction of Indian Country not only elucidates how Native American literatures and federal Indian law are each crucial to any reading of the other, it also guides readers to better understand the genocidal assault on Indigenous peoples by Western structures of literacy, politics, and law.

California would be a different place today without the imprint of Spanish culture and the legacy of Indian civilization. The colonial Spanish missions that dot the coast and foothills between Sonoma and San Diego are relics of a past that transformed California’s landscape and its people.

In a spare and accessible style, Colonial Rosary looks at the complexity of California’s Indian civilization and the social effects of missionary control. While oppressive institutions lasted in California for almost eighty years under the tight reins of royal Spain, the Catholic Church, and the government of Mexico, letters and government documents reveal the missionaries’ genuine concern for the Indian communities they oversaw for their health, spiritual upbringing, and material needs.

With its balanced attention to the variety of sources on the mission period, Colonial Rosary illuminates ongoing debates over the role of the Franciscan missions in the settlement of California.

By sharing the missions’ stories of tragedy and triumph, author Alison Lake underlines the importance of preserving these vestiges of California’s prestatehood period. An illustrated tour of the missions as well as a sensitive record of their impact on California history and culture, Colonial Rosary brings the story of the Spanish missions of California alive.

West of the Four Corners and east of the Colorado River, in southeastern Utah, a unique one-hundred-mile-long, two-hundred-foot-high, serrated cliff cuts the sky. Whether viewed as barrier wall or sheltering sanctuary, Comb Ridge has helped define life and culture in this region for thousands of years. Today, the area it crosses is still relatively remote, though an important part of a scenic complex of popular tourist destinations that includes Natural Bridges National Monument and Grand Gulch just to the west, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Lake Powell a bit farther west, Canyonlands National Park to the north, Hovenweep National Monument to the east, and the San Juan River and Monument Valley to the south. Prehistorically Comb Ridge split an intensively used Ancient Puebloan homeland. It later had similar cultural—both spiritual and practical—significance to Utes, Paiutes, and Navajos and played a crucial role in the history of European American settlement. To tell the story of this rock that is unlike any other rock in the world and the diverse people whose lives it has affected, Robert S. McPherson, author of multiple books on Navajos and on the Four Corners region, draws on the findings of a major, federally funded project to research the cultural history of Comb Ridge. He carries the story forward to contention over present and future uses of Comb Ridge and the spectacular country surrounding it.

The Attack Along the Washita River, Custer’s Last Victory and the Action That Led to the Plains Indians’ United Quest for Retribution
The cold dawn of November 27, 1868, was the moment George Armstrong Custer had longed for ever since the Civil War ended three years before. It was also the moment Black Kettle of the Cheyenne nation had feared ever since he had survived the deadly attack on his people at Sand Creek, Colorado Territory. Custer, who gloried in battle, was no longer the national hero, the celebrity he had been in wartime. He was a forgotten man who had failed in his first Indian campaign the year before. He needed a resounding victory to resurrect the attention he craved, and the sleepy Cheyenne village along the banks of the Washita River—ironically near present-day Cheyenne, Oklahoma—proved irresistible. Custer led his 7th U.S. Cavalry in an early morning charge that wiped out the encampment, killing those who resisted and some of those who fled. Black Kettle’s Cheyenne had signed documents of peace with the U.S. Government as they had done before Sand Creek, but once again that did not protect them. Custer ordered his troops to capture women and children and traveled with these prisoners as a way to shield his column from a retaliatory strike on their way back to their post. Called both a massacre and a battle, the action at the Washita River returned Custer to national prominence as the “greatest Indian fighter of all.”
Coming Through Fire: George Armstrong Custer and Chief Black Kettle tells the converging stories of a Civil War hero and a native warrior who met along the Washita River. Black Kettle had given up fighting—he had “come through the fire”— and made his mark on treaty after treaty to try to save the Cheyenne and their way of life from the encroachments of the U.S. government and white settlers. He watched the government breach the terms of each treaty, yet he continued to work for a compromise, knowing that negotiations were the only way his people could survive. But the flood of wagon trains and settlements, the killing of the great buffalo herds, the new diseases and broken promises, political ambition, naked greed, and continuing restrictions on land, food, and shelter persisted. As the U.S. Army, including Custer, continued to attack and forceably move Indians to reservations despite treaties indicating otherwise, Black Kettle’s dreams of peace were shattered. He ended his life face down in the freezing waters of the Washita River, shot by one of Custer’s troopers. The “greatest Indian fighter” would not survive the Indian Wars either, cut down near the Little Big Horn River, in part for his actions against Black Kettle and the Cheyenne.

Illuminates the significance of writing to colonial-era Native American resistance

Literary critics frequently portray early Native American writers either as individuals caught between two worlds or as subjects who, even as they defied the colonial world, struggled to exist within it. In striking counterpoint to these analyses, Lisa Brooks demonstrates the ways in which Native leaders—including Samson Occom, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, and William Apess—adopted writing as a tool to reclaim rights and land in the Native networks of what is now the northeastern United States.

“The Common Pot,” a metaphor that appears in Native writings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, embodies land, community, and the shared space of sustenance among relations. Far from being corrupted by forms of writing introduced by European colonizers, Brooks contends, Native people frequently rejected the roles intended for them by their missionary teachers and used the skills they acquired to compose petitions, political tracts, and speeches; to record community councils and histories; and most important, to imagine collectively the routes through which the Common Pot could survive.Reframing the historical landscape of the region, Brooks constructs a provocative new picture of Native space before and after colonization. By recovering and reexamining Algonquian and Iroquoian texts, she shows that writing was not a foreign technology but rather a crucial weapon in the Native Americans’ arsenal as they resisted—and today continue to oppose—colonial domination.

In this autobiography, Viola Burnette braids the history of the Lakota people with the story of her own life as an Iyeska, or mixed-race Indian. Bringing together her years growing up on a reservation, her work as a lawyer and legal advocate for Native peoples, and her woman’s perspective, she draws the reader into an intelligent and intimate conversation.
 
The Fort Laramie treaties of 1851 and 1868 changed everything for the Sioux. When Burnette was born on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in the late 1930s, her people were still striving to make sense of how to live under the impoverished conditions created by the imposed land restrictions. Like most Native children at that time, she was forced by federal law to attend boarding school and assimilate into white culture. Her story reveals the resulting internal conflict that she and her people faced in embracing their own identity in a world where those in authority taught that speaking Lakota and being Indian were wrong. After a difficult jump into adulthood, Burnette emerged from an abusive marriage and, while raising four children, enrolled in junior college in her thirties and law school in her forties. She went on to become an advocate for women subjected to domestic violence and the first attorney general for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe.
 
Borne out under the far-reaching effects of the government-enforced restructuring of her people, Burnette’s inspiring narrative of strength and determination makes clear the importance of understanding history from a Native standpoint.
 
“I am an Iyeska and I am assimilated, but on my own terms. I choose when, where, and how I use the knowledge and skills I have learned. As long as we continue to teach our children and grandchildren the language, values, and traditions of the Lakota people, we will survive.”—from the book
 

Like Cortés and Pizarro, Coronado Sought to Conquer a Native American Empire of the Southwest

Winner of Two Colorado Book Awards

The historic 1540–1542 expedition of Captain-General Francisco Vasquez de Coronado is popularly remembered as a luckless party of exploration which wandered the American Southwest and then blundered onto the central Great Plains of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The expedition, as historian John M. Hutchins relates in Coronado’s Well-Equipped Army: The Spanish Invasion of the American Southwest, was a military force of about 1,500 individuals, made up of Spanish soldiers, Indian warrior allies, and camp followers. Despite the hopes for a peaceful conquest of new lands—including those of a legendary kingdom of Cibola—the expedition was obliged to fight a series of battles with the natives in present-day Sonora, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. The final phase of the invasion was less warlike, as the members of the expedition searched the Great Plains in vain for a wealthy civilization called Quivira.While much has been written about the march of Coronado and his men, this is the first book to address the endeavor as a military campaign of potential conquest like those conducted by other conquistadors. This helps to explain many of the previously misunderstood activities of the expedition. In addition, new light is cast on the non-Spanish participants, including Mexican Indian allies and African retainers, as well as the important roles of women.

The definitive rock art book on Painted Bluff, Alabama

Boasting more than 130 paintings and engravings, Painted Bluff is perhaps the most elaborate prehistoric pictograph site east of the Mississippi River. Positioned at several levels on a dramatic sandstone cliff along the Tennessee River in northern Alabama, the spectacular paintings and engravings depict mythical creatures, dancing humans, and mystical portals. The Cosmos Revealed: Precontact Mississippian Rock Art at Painted Bluff, Alabama is the first complete documentation of one of the most important archaeological sites in eastern North America. Through art, the site materializes a model or “cosmogram” of the Mississippian Native American view of the universe, offering connections between the visible and invisible worlds for Native spiritual leaders and other visitors.

Discovered by Euro-Americans in the early 1800s, the site became known as “Painted Bluff” because of its pictographs, but inexplicably it has only recently been subjected to the intensive archaeological study it deserves. Under the auspices of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the authors of this volume have documented and assessed the site since 2005, and efforts have been made to reverse some of the vandalism that has occurred over many decades and to stabilize natural degradation of the cliff and its artwork.

Including more than one hundred remarkable prehistoric paintings on the cliff face that have been recorded, mapped, and photographed, this book synthesizes the research done on Painted Bluff to date and documents the entire site. Richly illustrated chapters cover the historical background, geology and archaeology, documentation methods, types of rock art, stratigraphy, paint recipes, TVA management, graffiti removal, and a summary that broadly synthesizes the meaning, timeframe, artistry, organization, conceptual boundaries, and the cosmos revealed. This groundbreaking study features 113 color photographs and a complete catalog of the pictographs and petroglyphs at the site.
 

The works of Edward Abbey have been well known to general readers since the 1960’s. This volume, the first comprehensive collection of literary criticism devoted to the entire challenging corpus of Abbey’s fiction and nonfiction, couldn’t be more timely or significant.

From the perspective of his scholarly critics in Western American literature and environmental studies Ed Abbey is, in a word, problematic. As Peter Quigley, volume editor, comments, "The title of this collection refers to a number of references within Abbey’s work. The maze is a place of myriad canyons, of wonder, and a place where the desperadoes in The Monkey Wrench Gang could lose the authorities. The coyote refers to the slippery figure in Native American myth, a figure, known to Abbey, that always eluded definition an could slip out of every trap set to catch him." In this long-awaited anthology, eighteen intrepid scholars have chosen to ignore the coyote’s reputation, tracking Abbey in one masterful and illuminating essay after another through the canyons of anarchist politics, philosophy, feminist literary criticism, post-structuralism, and rhetoric, as well as nature and environmental theory and activism.

"Coyote was tired of being cold," says this traditional Shoshone tale about the arrival of fire in the northern Wasatch region.

Members of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation developed the concept for this retelling in collaboration with book arts teacher Tamara Zollinger. Together, they wrote and illustrated the book.

Bright watercolor-and-salt techniques provide a winning background to the hand-cut silhouettes of the characters. The lively, humorous story about Coyote and his friends is complemented perfectly by later pages written by Northwestern Shoshone elders on the historical background and cultural heritage of the Shoshone nation.

An audio CD with the voice of Helen Timbimboo telling the story in Shoshone and singing two traditional songs makes this book not only good entertainment but an important historical document, too.

William Wyman’s notes and introduction put the Stiggins account into historical perspective and trace its circuitous route to publication. First issued in 1989, Creek Indian History has become an important primary document for the study of Native American history and culture.

Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds explores the critically neglected intersection of Native and African American cultures. This interdisciplinary collection combines historical studies of the complex relations between blacks and Indians in Native communities with considerations and examples of various forms of cultural expression that have emerged from their intertwined histories. The contributors include scholars of African American and Native American studies, English, history, anthropology, law, and performance studies, as well as fiction writers, poets, and a visual artist.

Essays range from a close reading of the 1838 memoirs of a black and Native freewoman to an analysis of how Afro-Native intermarriage has impacted the identities and federal government classifications of certain New England Indian tribes. One contributor explores the aftermath of black slavery in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, highlighting issues of culture and citizenship. Another scrutinizes the controversy that followed the 1998 selection of a Miss Navajo Nation who had an African American father. A historian examines the status of Afro-Indians in colonial Mexico, and an ethnographer reflects on oral histories gathered from Afro-Choctaws. Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds includes evocative readings of several of Toni Morrison’s novels, interpretations of plays by African American and First Nations playwrights, an original short story by Roberta J. Hill, and an interview with the Creek poet and musician Joy Harjo. The Native American scholar Robert Warrior develops a theoretical model for comparative work through an analysis of black and Native intellectual production. In his afterword, he reflects on the importance of the critical project advanced by this volume.

Contributors. Jennifer D. Brody, Tamara Buffalo, David A. Y. O. Chang, Robert Keith Collins, Roberta J. Hill, Sharon P. Holland, ku'ualoha ho’omnawanui, Deborah E. Kanter, Virginia Kennedy, Barbara Krauthamer, Tiffany M. McKinney, Melinda Micco, Tiya Miles, Celia E. Naylor, Eugene B. Redmond, Wendy S. Walters, Robert Warrior

In his eighty-seven years, Norman Maclean played many parts: fisherman, logger, firefighter, scholar, teacher. But it was a role he took up late in life, that of writer, that won him enduring fame and critical acclaim—as well as the devotion of readers worldwide. When he died in 1990, Maclean left behind an earlier unfinished project, on a topic that had held his attention for decades: General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The portions of that writing that remain reveal a deep interest not only in the battle itself but also its afterlife—how historical events influence popular culture and how retellings revise the past. Summarizing the events from the various perspectives of the Americans, the Sioux, and the Cheyenne, Maclean explains why the battle lives on in our imagination. Custer’s “last stand” provides all the elements—the characters, the plot, and the backdrop—of the perfect dramatic tragedy. And the way we retell history, argues Maclean, is intimately tied to how we choose to memorialize defeat.