front cover of Native and Spanish New Worlds
Native and Spanish New Worlds
Sixteenth-Century Entradas in the American Southwest and Southeast
Edited by Clay Mathers, Jeffrey M. Mitchem, and Charles M. Haecker
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Spanish-led entradas—expeditions bent on the exploration and control of new territories—took place throughout the sixteenth century in what is now the southern United States. Although their impact was profound, both locally and globally, detailed analyses of these encounters are notably scarce. Focusing on several major themes—social, economic, political, military, environmental, and demographic—the contributions gathered here explore not only the cultures and peoples involved in these unique engagements but also the wider connections and disparities between these borderlands and the colonial world in general during the first century of Native–European contact in North America. Bringing together research from both the southwestern and southeastern United States, this book offers a comparative synthesis of Native–European contacts and their consequences in both regions. The chapters also engage at different scales of analysis, from locally based research to macro-level evaluations, using documentary, paleoclimatic, and regional archaeological data.

No other volume assembles such a wide variety of archaeological, ethnohistorical, environmental, and biological information to elucidate the experience of Natives and Europeans in the early colonial world of Northern New Spain, and the global implications of entradas during this formative period in borderlands history.
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front cover of Native Plants for Southwestern Landscapes
Native Plants for Southwestern Landscapes
By Judy Mielke
University of Texas Press, 1993

Winner, Xeriscape Award of Recognition, Arizona Municipal Water Users Association
Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association

For gardeners who want to conserve water, the color, fragrance, shade, and lush vegetation of a traditional garden may seem like a mirage in the desert. But such gardens can flourish when native plants grow in them. In this book, Judy Mielke, an expert on Southwestern gardening, offers the most comprehensive guide available to landscaping with native plants. Writing simply enough for beginning gardeners, while also providing ample information for landscape professionals, she presents over three hundred trees, shrubs, vines, grasses, groundcovers, wildflowers, cacti, and other native plants suited to arid landscapes.

The heart of the book lies in the complete descriptions and beautiful color photographs of plants native to the Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan desert regions of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. Mielke characterizes each plant and gives detailed information on its natural habitat, its water, soil, light, temperature, and pruning requirements, and its possible uses in landscape design.

In addition, Mielke includes informative discussions of desert ecology, growing instructions for native plants and wildflowers, and "how-to" ideas for revegetation of disturbed desert areas using native plants. She concludes the book with an extensive list of plants by type, including those that have specific features such as shade or fragrance. She also supplies a list of public gardens that showcase native plants.

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Navajo Nation Peacemaking
Living Traditional Justice
Edited by Marianne O. Nielsen and James W. Zion
University of Arizona Press, 2005
Navajo peacemaking is one of the most renowned restorative justice programs in the world. Neither mediation nor alternative dispute resolution, it has been called a “horizontal system of justice” because all participants are treated as equals with the purpose of preserving ongoing relationships and restoring harmony among involved parties. In peacemaking there is no coercion, and there are no “sides.” No one is labeled the offender or the victim, the plaintiff or the defendant. This is a book about peacemaking as it exists in the Navajo Nation today, describing its origins, history, context, and contributions with an eye toward sharing knowledge between Navajo and European-based criminal justice systems. It provides practitioners with information about important aspects of peacemaking—such as structure, procedures, and outcomes—that will be useful for them as they work with the Navajo courts and the peacemakers. It also offers outsiders the first one-volume overview of this traditional form of justice. The collection comprises insights of individuals who have served within the Navajo Judicial Branch, voices that authoritatively reflect peacemaking from an insider’s point of view. It also features an article by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and includes contributions from other scholars who, with the cooperation of the Navajo Nation, have worked to bring a comparative perspective to peacemaking research. In addition, some chapters describe the personal journey through which peacemaking takes the parties in a dispute, demonstrating that its purpose is not to fulfill some abstract notion of Justice but to restore harmony so that the participants are returned to good relations. Navajo Nation Peacemaking seeks to promote both peacemaking and Navajo common law development. By establishing the foundations of the Navajo way of natural justice and offering a vision for its future, it shows that there are many lessons offered by Navajo peacemaking for those who want to approach old problems in sensible new ways.
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Navajo Places
Laurance D. Linford
University of Utah Press, 2000

Navajoland is the heart and soul of the American Southwest. While the Navajo Reservation incorporates portions of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, this is only about half the traditional homeland of 220,000 Diné, the People. In one way or another, nearly all of it, including the original homeland, is sacred to them. Before Spaniards and Americans affixed their own names to the land, every topographic feature had at least one Navajo name. Many of these made their way onto maps—in various forms—or are still in use among Navajo speakers.

Navajo Places is the most ambitious attempt yet to preserve this rich legacy. Through years of research, interviews, and consultation with Navajo authorities, Laurance Linford has compiled a place-name guide that goes beyond reservation boundaries to include the entirety of the traditional Navajo homeland. The volume contains over 1,200 entries, plus a pronunciation guide and sections on Navajo history and the relation of ritual and sacred legend to landscape.

An invaluable resource for anyone interested in the Four Corners region.

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front cover of Navajo Weaving in the Late Twentieth Century
Navajo Weaving in the Late Twentieth Century
Kin, Community, and Collectors
Ann Lane Hedlund
University of Arizona Press, 2004
According to the Navajos, the holy people Spider Man and Spider Woman first brought the tools for weaving to the People. Over the centuries Navajo artists have used those tools to weave a web of beauty—a rich tradition that continues to the present day.

In testimony to this living art form, this book presents 74 dazzling color plates of Navajo rugs and wall hangings woven between 1971 and 1996. Drawn from a private southwestern collection, they represent the work of sixty of the finest native weavers in the American Southwest. The creations depicted here reflect a number of styles—revival, sandpainting, pictorial, miniature, sampler—and a number of major regional variations, from Ganado to Teec Nos Pos.

Textile authority Ann Hedlund provides an introductory narrative about the development of Navajo textile collecting—including the shift of attention from artifacts to art—and a brief review of the history of Navajo weaving. She then comments on the shaping of the particular collection represented in the book, offering a rich source of knowledge and insight for other collectors.

Explaining themes in Navajo weaving over the quarter-century represented by the Santa Fe Collection, Hedlund focuses on the development of modern rug designs and the influence on weavers of family, community, artistic identity, and the marketplace. She also introduces each section of plates with a description of the representative style, its significance, and the weavers who perpetuate and deviate from it. In addition to the textile plates, Hedlund’s color photographs show the families, landscapes, livestock, hogans, and looms that surround today’s Navajo weavers.

Navajo Weaving in the Late Twentieth Century explores many of the important connections that exist today among weavers through their families and neighbors, and the significant role that collectors play in perpetuating this dynamic art form. For all who appreciate American Indian art and culture, this book provides invaluable guidance to the fine points of collecting and a rich visual feast.
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The New Desert Reader
Wild, Peter
University of Utah Press, 2006
The New Desert Reader brings together a historical cross section of writing about the American Southwest in selections that demonstrate how thinking about American deserts has changed from the earliest times to the present day. Beginning with the centuries-old legends of the Tohono O’Odham Indians, it moves through the foresighted observations of John Wesley Powell, one-armed explorer of the Grand Canyon; continues with the delicate appreciations of Mary Austin and Joseph Wood Krutch; includes examples of the keen activist writings of Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey; and finishes with such contemporary desert writers as Tony Hillerman and others.
A slow change in outlook dominates the book, as attitudes shift from viewing the desert as a place to be despised or exploited to an appreciation of it as a special place, an arena of highly complex natural communities, and a wild refuge for the human body and soul. Comprehensive and brightly informative, The New Desert Reader will be invaluable to anyone interested in the history, literature, and beauty of North America’s treasured desert places. 
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front cover of New Mexico and the Pimería Alta
New Mexico and the Pimería Alta
The Colonial Period in the American Southwest
John G. Douglass
University Press of Colorado, 2017

Winner of the 2017 Arizona Literary Award for Published Nonfiction

Focusing on the two major areas of the Southwest that witnessed the most intensive and sustained colonial encounters, New Mexico and the Pimería Alta compares how different forms of colonialism and indigenous political economies resulted in diverse outcomes for colonists and Native peoples. Taking a holistic approach and studying both colonist and indigenous perspectives through archaeological, ethnohistorical, historical, and landscape data, contributors examine how the processes of colonialism played out in the American Southwest.

Although these broad areas—New Mexico and southern Arizona/northern Sonora—share a similar early colonial history, the particular combination of players, sociohistorical trajectories, and social relations within each area led to, and were transformed by, markedly diverse colonial encounters. Understanding these different mixes of players, history, and social relations provides the foundation for conceptualizing the enormous changes wrought by colonialism throughout the region. The presentations of different cultural trajectories also offer important avenues for future thought and discussion on the strategies for missionization and colonialism.

The case studies tackle how cultures evolved in the light of radical transformations in cultural traits or traditions and how different groups reconciled to this change. A much needed up-to-date examination of the colonial era in the Southwest, New Mexico and the Pimería Alta demonstrates the intertwined relationships between cultural continuity and transformation during a time of immense change and highlights contemporary thought on the colonial experience.

Contributors: Joseph Aguilar, Jimmy Arterberry, Heather Atherton, Dale Brenneman, J. Andrew Darling, John G. Douglass, B. Sunday Eiselt, Severin Fowles, William M. Graves, Lauren Jelinek, Kelly L. Jenks, Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa, Phillip O. Leckman, Matthew Liebmann, Kent G. Lightfoot, Lindsay Montgomery, Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman, Robert Preucel, Matthew Schmader, Thomas E. Sheridan, Colleen Strawhacker, J. Homer Thiel, David Hurst Thomas, Laurie D. Webster

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front cover of New Perspectives on Mimbres Archaeology
New Perspectives on Mimbres Archaeology
Three Millennia of Human Occupation in the North American Southwest
Edited by Barbara J. Roth, Patricia A. Gilman, and Roger Anyon
University of Arizona Press, 2018
In the early 1970s, understanding of the Mimbres region as a whole was in its infancy. In the following decades, thanks to dedicated work by enterprising archaeologists and nonprofit organizations, our understanding of the Mimbres region has become more complex, nuanced, and rich.

New Perspectives on Mimbres Archaeology brings together these experts in a single volume for the first time. The contributors discuss current knowledge of the people who lived in the Mimbres region of the southwestern United States and how our knowledge has changed since the Mimbres Foundation, directed by Steven A. LeBlanc, began the first modern archaeological investigations in the region. Many of these authors have spent decades conducting the fieldwork that has allowed for a broader understanding of Mimbres society.

Focusing on a variety of important research topics of interest to archaeologists—including the social contexts of people and communities, the role of ritual and ideology in Mimbres society, evidence of continuities and cultural change through time, and the varying impacts of external influences throughout the region—New Perspectives on Mimbres Archaeology presents recent data on and interpretations of the entire pre-Hispanic sequence of occupation. Additional contributions include a history of nonprofit archaeology by William H. Doelle and a concluding chapter by Steven A. LeBlanc reflecting on his decades-long work in Mimbres archaeology and outlining important areas for the next wave of research.
 
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front cover of No Place for a Lady
No Place for a Lady
The Life Story of Archaeologist Marjorie F. Lambert
Shelby Tisdale
University of Arizona Press, 2023
In the first half of the twentieth century, the canyons and mesas of the Southwest beckoned and the burgeoning field of archaeology thrived. Among those who heeded the call, Marjorie Ferguson Lambert became one of only a handful of women who left their imprint on the study of southwestern archaeology and anthropology.

In this delightful biography, we gain insight into a time when there were few women establishing full-time careers in anthropology, archaeology, or museums. Shelby Tisdale successfully combines Lambert’s voice from extensive interviews with her own to take us on a thought-provoking journey into how Lambert created a successful and satisfying professional career and personal life in a place she loved (the American Southwest) while doing what she loved.

Through Lambert’s life story we gain new insight into the intricacies and politics involved in the development of archaeology and museums in New Mexico and the greater Southwest. We also learn about the obstacles that young women had to maneuver around in the early years of the development of southwestern archaeology as a profession. Tisdale brings into focus one of the long-neglected voices of women in the intellectual history of anthropology and archaeology and highlights how gender roles played out in the past in determining the career paths of young women. She also highlights what has changed and what has not in the twenty-first century.

Women’s voices have long been absent throughout history, and Marjorie Lambert’s story adds to the growing literature on feminist archaeology.
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front cover of Northern Navajo Frontier 1860 1900
Northern Navajo Frontier 1860 1900
Robert S. McPherson
Utah State University Press, 2001
McPherson argues that, instead of being a downtrodden group of prisoners, defeated militarily in the 1860s and dependent on the U.S. government for protection and guidance in the 1870s and 80s, the Navajo nation was vigorously involved in defending and expanding the borders of their homelands. This was accomplished not through war nor as a concerted effort, but by an aggressive defensive policy built on individual action that varied with changing circumstances. Many Navajos never made the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo. Instead they eluded capture in northern and western hinterlands and thereby pushed out their frontier. This book focuses on the events and activities in one part of the Navajo borderlands-the northern frontier-where between 1860 and 1900 the Navajos were able to secure a large portion of land that is still part of the reservation. This expansion was achieved during a period when most Native Americans were losing their lands.
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front cover of Northern New Spain
Northern New Spain
A Research Guide
Thomas C. Barnes, Thomas H. Naylor, and Charles W. Polzer
University of Arizona Press, 1981
This research guide was first conceived to fulfill multiple needs of the research team of the Documentary Relations of the Southwest (DRSW) project at the Arizona State Museum. In performing research tasks, it became evident that reference material was scattered throughout scores of books and monographs. A single complete source book was simply not available. Hence, the editors of the DRSW project compiled this guide. The territory under study comprises all of northern Mexico in colonial times.
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