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Africans and Native Americans
The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples
Jack D. Forbes
University of Illinois Press, 1993
Jack D. Forbes's monumental Africans and Native Americans has become a canonical text in the study of relations between the two groups. Forbes explores key issues relating to the evolution of racial terminology and European colonialists' perceptions of color, analyzing the development of color classification systems and the specific evolution of key terms such as black, mulatto, and mestizo--terms that no longer carry their original meanings. Forbes also presents strong evidence that Native American and African contacts began in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean.
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Aggression and Sufferings
Settler Violence, Native Resistance, and the Coalescence of the Old South
F. Evan Nooe
University of Alabama Press, 2024
A bold reconceptualization of how settler expansion and narratives of victimhood, honor, and revenge drove the conquest and erasure of the Native South and fed the emergence of a distinct white southern identity
 
In 1823, Tennessee historian John Haywood encapsulated a foundational sentiment among the white citizenry of Tennessee when he wrote of a “long continued course of aggression and sufferings” between whites and Native Americans. According to F. Evan Nooe, “aggression” and “sufferings” are broad categories that can be used to represent the framework of factors contributing to the coalescence of the white South.

Traditionally, the concept of coalescence is an anthropological model used to examine the transformation of Indigenous communities in the Eastern Woodlands from chieftaincies to Native tribes, confederacies, and nations in response to colonialism. Applying this concept to white southerners, Nooe argues that through the experiences and selective memory of settlers in the antebellum South, white southerners incorporated their aggression against and suffering at the hands of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeast in the coalescence of a regional identity built upon the violent dispossession of the Native South. This, in turn, formed a precursor to Confederate identity and its later iterations in the long nineteenth century.

Geographically, Aggression and Sufferings prioritizes events in South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Nooe considers how divergent systems of violence and justice between Native Americans and white settlers (such as blood revenge and concepts of honor) functioned in the region and examines the involved societies’ conflicting standards on how to equitably resolve interpersonal violence. Finally, Nooe explores how white southerners constructed, propagated, and perpetuated harrowing tales of colonizers as both victims and heroes in the violent expulsion of the region’s Native peoples from their homelands. This constructed sense of regional history and identity continued to flower into the antebellum period, during western expansion, and well through the twentieth century.
 
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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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The Black Shoals
Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies
Tiffany Lethabo King
Duke University Press, 2019
In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal—an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea—as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. These interactions, which often foreground Black and Native discourses of conquest and critiques of humanism, offer alternative insights into understanding how slavery, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide structure white supremacy. Among texts and topics, King examines eighteenth-century British mappings of humanness, Nativeness, and Blackness; Black feminist depictions of Black and Native erotics; Black fungibility as a critique of discourses of labor exploitation; and Black art that rewrites conceptions of the human. In outlining the convergences and disjunctions between Black and Native thought and aesthetics, King identifies the potential to create new epistemologies, lines of critical inquiry, and creative practices.
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Capture These Indians for the Lord
Indians, Methodists, and Oklahomans, 1844-1939
Tash Smith
University of Arizona Press, 2014
In 1844, on the heels of the final wave of the forced removal of thousands of Indians from the southern United States to what is now Oklahoma, the Southern Methodist Church created a separate organization known as the Indian Mission Conference to oversee its missionary efforts among the Native communities of Indian Territory. Initially, the Church conducted missions as part of the era’s push toward assimilation. But what the primarily white missionaries quickly encountered was a population who exerted more autonomy than they expected and who used Christianity to protect their culture, both of which frustrated those eager to bring Indian Territory into what they felt was mainstream American society.

In Capture These Indians for the Lord, Tash Smith traces the trajectory of the Southern Methodist Church in Oklahoma when it was at the frontlines of the relentless push toward western expansion. Although many Native people accepted the missionaries’ religious practices, Smith shows how individuals found ways to reconcile the Methodist force with their traditional cultural practices. When the white population of Indian Territory increased and Native sovereignty came under siege during the allotment era of the 1890s, white communities marginalized Indians within the Church and exploited elements of mission work for their own benefit.

Later, with white indifference toward Indian missions peaking in the early twentieth century, Smith explains that as the remnants of the Methodist power weakened, Indian membership regained control and used the Church to regenerate their culture. Throughout, Smith explores the complex relationships between white and Indian community members and how these phenomena shaped Methodist churches in the twentieth century.
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Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds
The African Diaspora in Indian Country
Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland, eds.
Duke University Press, 2006
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

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Fictions of Land and Flesh
Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation
Mark Rifkin
Duke University Press, 2019
In Fictions of Land and Flesh Mark Rifkin explores the impasses that arise in seeking to connect Black and Indigenous movements, turning to speculative fiction to understand those difficulties and envision productive ways of addressing them. Against efforts to subsume varied forms of resistance into a single framework in the name of solidarity, Rifkin argues that Black and Indigenous political struggles are oriented in distinct ways, following their own lines of development and contestation. Rifkin suggests how movement between the two can be approached as something of a speculative leap in which the terms and dynamics of one are disoriented in the encounter with the other. Futurist fiction provides a compelling site for exploring such disjunctions. Through analyses of works by Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley, Nalo Hopkinson, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, and others, the book illustrates how ideas about fungibility, fugitivity, carcerality, marronage, sovereignty, placemaking, and governance shape the ways Black and Indigenous intellectuals narrate the past, present, and future. In turning to speculative fiction, Rifkin illustrates how speculation as a process provides conceptual and ethical resources for recognizing difference while engaging across it.
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George Galphin's Intimate Empire
The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America
Bryan C. Rindfleisch
University of Alabama Press, 2019
A revealing saga detailing the economic, familial, and social bonds forged by Indian trader George Galphin in the early American South
 
A native of Ireland, George Galphin arrived in South Carolina in 1737 and quickly emerged as one of the most proficient deerskin traders in the South. This was due in large part to his marriage to Metawney, a Creek Indian woman from the town of Coweta, who incorporated Galphin into her family and clan, allowing him to establish one of the most profitable merchant companies in North America. As part of his trade operations, Galphin cemented connections with Indigenous and European peoples across the South, while simultaneously securing links to merchants and traders in the British Empire, continental Europe, and beyond.
 
In George Galphin’s Intimate Empire: The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America, Bryan C. Rindfleisch presents a complex narrative about eighteenth-century cross-cultural relationships. Reconstructing the multilayered bonds forged by Galphin and challenging scholarly understandings of life in the Native South, the American South more broadly, and the Atlantic World, Rindfleisch looks simultaneously at familial, cultural, political, geographical, and commercial ties—examining how eighteenth-century people organized their world, both mentally and physically. He demonstrates how Galphin’s importance emerged through the people with whom he bonded. At their most intimate, Galphin’s multilayered relationships revolved around the Creek, Anglo-French, and African children who comprised his North American family, as well as family and friends on the other side of the Atlantic.
 
Through extensive research in primary sources, Rindfleisch reconstructs an expansive imperial world that stretches across the American South and reaches into London and includes Indians, Europeans, and Africans who were intimately interconnected and mutually dependent. As a whole, George Galphin’s Intimate Empire provides critical insights into the intensely personal dimensions and cross-cultural contours of the eighteenth-century South and how empire-building and colonialism were, by their very nature, intimate and familial affairs.
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Indian Work
Language and Livelihood in Native American History
Daniel H. Usner Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2009

Representations of Indian economic life have played an integral role in discourses about poverty, social policy, and cultural difference but have received surprisingly little attention. Daniel Usner dismantles ideological characterizations of Indian livelihood to reveal the intricacy of economic adaptations in American Indian history.

Officials, reformers, anthropologists, and artists produced images that exacerbated Indians’ economic uncertainty and vulnerability. From Jeffersonian agrarianism to Jazz Age primitivism, European American ideologies not only obscured Indian struggles for survival but also operated as obstacles to their success. Diversification and itinerancy became economic strategies for many Indians, but were generally maligned in the early United States. Indians repeatedly found themselves working in spaces that reinforced misrepresentation and exploitation. Taking advantage of narrow economic opportunities often meant risking cultural integrity and personal dignity: while sales of baskets made by Louisiana Indian women contributed to their identity and community, it encouraged white perceptions of passivity and dependence. When non-Indian consumption of Indian culture emerged in the early twentieth century, even this friendlier market posed challenges to Indian labor and enterprise. The consequences of this dilemma persist today.

Usner reveals that Indian engagement with commerce has consistently defied the narrow choices that observers insisted upon seeing.

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Individuality Incorporated
Indians and the Multicultural Modern
Joel Pfister
Duke University Press, 2004
Spanning the 1870s to the present, Individuality Incorporated demonstrates how crucial a knowledge of Native American-White history is to rethinking key issues in American studies, cultural studies, and the history of subjectivity. Joel Pfister proposes an ingenious critical and historical reinterpretation of constructions of “Indians” and “individuals.” Native Americans have long contemplated the irony that the government used its schools to coerce children from diverse tribes to view themselves first as “Indians”—encoded as the evolutionary problem—and then as “individuals”—defined as the civilized industrial solution. As Luther Standing Bear, Charles Eastman, and Black Elk attest, tribal cultures had their own complex ways of imagining, enhancing, motivating, and performing the self that did not conform to federal blueprints labeled “individuality.” Enlarging the scope of this history of “individuality,” Pfister elaborates the implications of state, corporate, and aesthetic experiments that moved beyond the tactics of an older melting pot hegemony to impose a modern protomulticultural rule on Natives. The argument focuses on the famous Carlisle Indian School; assimilationist novels; Native literature and cultural critique from Zitkala-Sa to Leslie Marmon Silko; Taos and Santa Fe bohemians (Mabel Dodge Luhan, D. H. Lawrence, Mary Austin); multicultural modernisms (Fred Kabotie, Oliver La Farge, John Sloan, D’Arcy McNickle); the Southwestern tourism industry’s development of corporate multiculturalism; the diversity management schemes that John Collier implemented as head of the Indian New Deal; and early formulations of ethnic studies. Pfister’s unique analysis moves from Gilded Age incorporations of individuality to postmodern incorporations of multicultural reworkings of individuality to unpack what is at stake in producing subjectivity in World America.
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Interrupted Odyssey
Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians
Mary Stockwell
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
In this first book devoted to the genesis, failure, and lasting legacy of Ulysses S. Grant’s comprehensive American Indian policy, Mary Stockwell shows Grant as an essential bridge between Andrew Jackson’s pushing Indians out of the American experience and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s welcoming them back in. Situating Grant at the center of Indian policy development after the Civil War, Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians reveals the bravery and foresight of the eighteenth president in saying that Indians must be saved and woven into the fabric of American life.

In the late 1860s, before becoming president, Grant collaborated with Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian who became his first commissioner of Indian affairs, on a plan to rescue the tribes from certain destruction. Grant hoped to save the Indians from extermination by moving them to reservations, where they would be guarded by the U.S. Army, and welcoming them into the nation as American citizens. By so doing, he would restore the executive branch’s traditional authority over Indian policy that had been upended by Jackson.

In Interrupted Odyssey, Stockwell rejects the common claim in previous Grant scholarship that he handed the reservations over to Christian missionaries as part of his original policy. In part because Grant’s plan ended political patronage, Congress overturned his policy by disallowing Army officers from serving in civil posts, abandoning the treaty system, and making the new Board of Indian Commissioners the supervisors of the Indian service. Only after Congress banned Army officers from the Indian service did Grant place missionaries in charge of the reservations, and only after the board falsely accused Parker of fraud before Congress did Grant lose faith in his original policy.

Stockwell explores in depth the ousting of Parker, revealing the deep-seated prejudices that fueled opposition to him, and details Grant’s stunned disappointment when the Modoc murdered his peace commissioners and several tribes—the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Sioux—rose up against his plans for them.

Though his dreams were interrupted through the opposition of Congress, reformers, and the tribes themselves, Grant set his country firmly toward making Indians full participants in the national experience. In setting Grant’s contributions against the wider story of the American Indians, Stockwell’s bold, thoughtful reappraisal reverses the general dismissal of Grant’s approach to the Indians as a complete failure and highlights the courage of his policies during a time of great prejudice.
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La Harpe's Post
Tales of French-Wichita Contact on the Eastern Plains
George H. Odell
University of Alabama Press, 2002

This major contribution to contact period studies points to the Lasley Vore site in modern Oklahoma as the most likely first meeting place of Plains Indians and Europeans more than 300 years ago.

In 1718, Jean-Baptiste Bénard, Sieur de la Harpe, departed St. Malo in Brittany for the New World. La Harpe, a member of the French bourgeoisie, arrived at Dauphin Island on the Gulf coast to take up the entrepreneurial concession provided by the director of the French colony, Jean Baptiste LeMoyne de Bienville. La Harpe's charge was to open a trading post on the Red River just above a Caddoan village not far from present-day Texarkana. Following the establishment of this post, La Harpe ventured farther north to extend his trade market into the region occupied by the Wichita Indians. Here he encountered a Tawakoni village with an estimated 6,000 inhabitants, a number that swelled to 7,000 during the ten-day visit.

Despite years of ethnohistoric and archaeological research, no scholar had successfully established where this important meeting took place. Then in 1988, George Odell and his crew surveyed and excavated an area 13 miles south of Tulsa, along the Arkansas River, that revealed undeniable association of Native American habitation refuse with 18th-century European trade goods.

Odell here presents a full account of the presumed location of the Tawakoni village as revealed through the analysis of excavated materials from nine specialist collaborators. In a strikingly well-written narrative report, employing careful study and innovative analysis supported by appendixes containing the excavation data, Odell combines documentary history and archaeological evidence to pinpoint the probable site of the first European contact with North American Plains Indians.

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Native Space
Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism
Natchee Blu Barnd
Oregon State University Press, 2017
Native Space explores how indigenous communities and individuals sustain and create geographies through place-naming, everyday cultural practices, and artistic activism, within the boundaries of the settler colonial nation of the United States. Diverging from scholarship that tends to treat indigenous geography as an analytical concept, Natchee Blu Barnd instead draws attention to the subtle manifestations of everyday cultural practices—the concrete and often mundane activities involved in the creation of indigenous space.
 
What are the limits and potentials of indigenous acts of spatial production? Native Space argues that control over the notion of “Indianness” still sits at the center of how space is produced in a neocolonial nation, and shows how non-indigenous communities uniquely deploy Native   identities in the direct construction of colonial geographies. In short, “the Indian” serves to create White space in concrete ways.  Yet, Native geographies effectively reclaim indigenous identities, assert ongoing relations to the land, and refuse the claims of settler colonialism. 
 
Barnd creatively and persuasively uses original cartographic research and demographic data, a series of interrelated stories set in the Midwestern Plains states of Kansas and Oklahoma, an examination of visual art by contemporary indigenous artists, and discussions of several forms of indigenous activism to support his argument. With its highly original, interdisciplinary approach, Native Space makes a significant contribution to the literature in cultural and critical geography, comparative ethnic studies, indigenous studies, cultural studies, American Studies, and related fields.
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New Worlds of Violence
Cultures and Conquests in the Early American Southeast
Matthew Jennings
University of Tennessee Press, 2011

From the early 1500s to the mid-1700s, the American Southeast was the scene of continuous
tumult as European powers vied for dominance in the region while waging war on Native American communities. Yet even before Hernando de Soto landed his expeditionary
force on the Gulf shores of Florida, Native Americans had created their own “cultures of violence”: sets of ideas about when it was appropriate to use violence and what sorts of violence were appropriate to a given situation.

In New Worlds of Violence, Matthew Jennings offers a persuasive new framework for understanding the European–Native American contact period and the conflicts among indigenous peoples that preceded it. This pioneering approach posits that every group present in the Southeast had its own ideas about the use of violence and that these ideas changed over time as they collided with one another. The book starts with the Mississippian era and continues through the successive Spanish and English invasions of the Native South. Jennings argues that the English conquered the Southeast because they were able to force everyone else to adapt to their culture of violence, which, of course, changed over time as well. By 1740, a peculiarly Anglo-American culture of violence was in place that would profoundly influence the expansion of England’s colonies and the eventual southern United States. While Native and African violence were present in this world, they moved in circles defined by the English.

New Worlds of Violence concludes by pointing out that long-lasting violence bears long-lasting consequences. An important contribution to the growing body of work on the early Southeast, this book will significantly broaden readers’ understanding of America’s violent past.

Matthew Jennings is an assistant professor of history at Macon State College in Macon, Georgia. He is the author of “Violence in a Shattered World” in Mapping the Shatter Zone: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, edited by Robbie Ethridge and Sheri Shuck-Hall. His work has also appeared in The Uniting States, The South Carolina Encyclopedia, A Multicultural History of the United States, and The Encyclopedia of Native American History.

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Otherwise Worlds
Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness
Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith, editors
Duke University Press, 2020
The contributors to Otherwise Worlds investigate the complex relationships between settler colonialism and anti-Blackness to explore the political possibilities that emerge from such inquiries. Pointing out that presumptions of solidarity, antagonism, or incommensurability between Black and Native communities are insufficient to understand the relationships between the groups, the volume's scholars, artists, and activists look to articulate new modes of living and organizing in the service of creating new futures. Among other topics, they examine the ontological status of Blackness and Indigeneity, possible forms of relationality between Black and Native communities, perspectives on Black and Indigenous sociality, and freeing the flesh from the constraints of violence and settler colonialism. Throughout the volume's essays, art, and interviews, the contributors carefully attend to alternative kinds of relationships between Black and Native communities that can lead toward liberation. In so doing, they critically point to the importance of Black and Indigenous conversations for formulating otherwise worlds.

Contributors
Maile Arvin, Marcus Briggs-Cloud, J. Kameron Carter, Ashon Crawley, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Chris Finley, Hotvlkuce Harjo, Sandra Harvey, Chad B. Infante, Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, Lindsay Nixon, Kimberly Robertson, Jared Sexton, Andrea Smith, Cedric Sunray, Se’mana Thompson, Frank B. Wilderson
 
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Race and Ethnicity in Latin America
Peter Wade
Pluto Press, 2010

For over ten years, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America has been an essential text for students studying the region. This second edition adds new material and brings the analysis up to date.

Race and ethnic identities are increasingly salient in Latin America. Peter Wade examines changing perspectives on Black and Indian populations in the region, tracing similarities and differences in the way these peoples have been seen by academics and national elites. Race and ethnicity as analytical concepts are re-examined in order to assess their usefulness.

This book should be the first port of call for anthropologists and sociologists studying identity in Latin America.

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Re-Collecting Black Hawk
Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest
Nicholas A. Brown
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024

The name Black Hawk permeates the built environment in the upper midwestern United States. It has been appropriated for everything from fitness clubs to used car dealerships. Makataimeshekiakiak, the Sauk Indian war leader whose name loosely translates to “Black Hawk,” surrendered in 1832 after hundreds of his fellow tribal members were slaughtered at the Bad Axe Massacre.
Re-Collecting Black Hawk examines the phenomena of this appropriation in the physical landscape, and the deeply rooted sentiments it evokes among Native Americans and descendants of European settlers. Nearly 170 original photographs are presented and juxtaposed with texts that reveal and complicate the significance of the imagery. Contributors include  tribal officials, scholars, activists, and others including George Thurman, the principal chief of the Sac and Fox Nation and a direct descendant of Black Hawk. These image-text encounters offer visions of both the past and present and the shaping of memory through landscapes that reach beyond their material presence into spaces of cultural and political power. As we witness, the evocation of Black Hawk serves as a painful reminder, a forced deference, and a veiled attempt to wipe away the guilt of past atrocities. Re-Collecting Black Hawk also points toward the future. By simultaneously unsettling and reconstructing the midwestern landscape, it envisions new modes of peaceful and just coexistence and suggests alternative ways of inhabiting the landscape.

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Separate Paths
Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey
Jean R. Soderlund
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Separate Paths: Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey is the first cross-cultural study of European colonization in the region south of the Falls of the Delaware River (now Trenton). Lenape men and women welcomed their allies, the Swedes and Finns, to escape more rigid English regimes on the west bank of the Delaware, offering land to establish farms, share resources, and trade. In the 1670s, Quaker men and women challenged this model with strategies to acquire all Lenape territory for their own use and to sell as real estate to new immigrants. Though the Lenapes remained sovereign and “old settlers” retained their Swedish Lutheran religion and ethnic autonomy, the West Jersey proprietors had considerable success in excluding Lenapes from their land. The Friends believed God favored their endeavor with epidemics of smallpox and other European diseases that destroyed Lenape families and communities. Affluent Quakers also introduced enslavement of imported Africans and Natives—and the violence that sustained it—to a colony they had promoted with the liberal West New Jersey Concessions of 1676-77. Thus, they defied their prior experience of religious persecution and their principles of peaceful resolution of conflict, equality of everyone before God, and the golden rule to treat others as you wish to be treated. Despite mutual commitment to peace by Lenapes, old settlers, and Friends, Quaker colonization had similar results to military conquests of Natives by English in Virginia and New England, and Dutch in the Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey. Still, in alliance with old settlers, Lenape communities survived in areas outside the focus of English colonization, in the Pine Barrens, upper reaches of streams, and Atlantic shore.
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Slavery Evolution Cherokee Society
1540-1866
Theda Perdue
University of Tennessee Press, 1987

Slavery was practiced among North American Indians long before Europeans arrived on these shores, bringing their own version of this “peculiar institution.” Unlike the European institution, however, Native American slavery was function of warfare among tribes, replenishment of population lost through intertribal conflict or disease, and establishment and preservation of tribal standards of behavior. American Indians had little use, in primary purpose of slavery among Europeans.

Theda Perdue here traces the history of slavery among the Cherokee Indians as it evolved from 1540 to 1866, indicating not only why the intrusion of whites, “slaves” contributed nothing to the Cherokee economy. During the colonial period, however, Cherokees actively began to capture members of other tribes and were themselves captured and sold to whites as chattels for the Caribbean slave trade. Also during this period, African slaves were introduced among the Indians, and when intertribal warfare ended, the use of forced labor to increase agricultural and other production emerged within Cherokee society.

Well aware that the institution of black slavery was only one of many important changes that gradually broke down the traditional Cherokee culture after 1540, Professor Perdue integrates her concern with slavery into the total picture of cultural transformation resulting from the clash between European and Amerindian societies. She has made good use of previous anthropological and sociological studies, and presents an excellent summary of the relevant historical materials, ever attempting to see cultural crises from the perspective of the Cherokees. The first over-all account of the effect of slavery upon the Cherokees, Perdue’s acute analysis and readable narrative provide the reader with a new angle of vision on the changing nature of Cherokee culture under the impact of increasing contact with Europeans.

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Taking Charge
Native American Self-Determination and Federal Indian Policy, 1975–1993
George Pierre Castile
University of Arizona Press, 2006
The Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975 sought to restore self-government to peoples whose community affairs had long been administered by outsiders. This book explores whether that bold ambition was actually realized. Taking Charge is a sequel to the author’s landmark work To Show Heart, which examined Indian policy through 1975. George Castile now explores federal Indian policy in the Carter, Reagan, and first Bush administrations, tracing developments triggered by executive and congressional action—or inaction—and focusing on the dynamics of self-determination as both policy objective and byword in the wake of the landmark 1975 legislation. Drawing on unpublished presidential papers and other archival sources, Castile chronicles the efforts of three presidents to uphold Richard Nixon’s commitment to policy change, weighing such issues as the impact of Reaganomics and the advent of Indian gaming. He examines the marginalizing of Indian policy in both the executive and legislative branches in the face of larger issues, as well as the recurring tendency of policy to be driven by a single determined individual, such as South Dakota senator James Abourezk. Although self-determination is roundly advocated by all concerned with federal Indian policy, until now no book has provided a grasp of both its background and its implications. Taking Charge is an essential contribution to the critical study of that policy that allows a better understanding of contemporary Indian affairs.
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The Tanana Chiefs
Native Rights and Western Law
Edited by William Schneider
University of Alaska Press, 2018
At the turn of the twentieth century, life was changing drastically in Alaska. The gold rush brought an onslaught of white settlers to the area, railroad companies were pushing into the territory, and telegraph lines opened up new lines of communication. The Native groups who had hunted and fished on the land for more than a century realized that if they did not speak up now, they would lose their land forever.

This is the story of a historic meeting between Native Athabascan leaders and government officials, held in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1915. It was one of the first times that Native voices were part of the official record. They sought education and medical assistance, and they wanted to know what they could expect from the federal government. They hoped for a balance between preserving their way of life with seeking new opportunities under the law.

The Tanana Chiefs chronicles the efforts by Alaska Natives to gain recognition for rights under Western law and the struggles to negotiate government-to-government relationships with the federal government. It contains the first full transcript of the historic meeting as well as essays that connect that first gathering with the continued efforts of the Tanana Chiefs Conference, which continues to meet and fight for Native rights.
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That Guy Wolf Dancing
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
Michigan State University Press, 2014
From one of the writers of the twentieth-century Native American Literary Renaissance comes a remarkable tale about how to acknowledge the past and take a chance on the future. Rooted in tribal-world consciousness, That Guy Wolf Dancing is the story of a young tribal wolf-man becoming a part of his not-sonatural world of non-tribal people. Twenty-something Philip Big Pipe disappears from an unsettled life he can hardly tolerate and ends up in an off-reservation town. When he leaves, he doesn’t tell anyone where he is going or what his plans, if he has any, might be. Having never taken himself too seriously, he now faces a world that feels very foreign to him. As he struggles to adapt to the modern universe, Philip, ever a “wolf dancer,” must improvise, this time to a sound others provide for him. Like the wolf, Philip sometimes feels hunted, outrun, verging on extinction. Only by moving rhythmically in a dissident, dangerous, and iconic world can Philip Big Pipe let go of the past and craft a new future.
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