American Indian Studies

In this enlightening book, scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history that have misinformed generations.

In this book the author offers a deeply knowing, darkly funny, unabashedly opinionated, and utterly unconventional account of Indian-White relations in North America since initial contact; in the process, he refashions old stories about historical events and figures.

Indians Illustrated is a social and cultural history of Indian illustrations in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Harper's Weekly, and other illustrated journals during the last half of the nineteenth century, the heyday of the American pictorial press.

In 1761 and again in 1768, European scientists raced around the world to observe the transit of Venus, a rare astronomical event in which the planet Venus passes in front of the sun. This book explores how indigeneity functions as transit, a trajectory of movement that serves as precedent within U.S. imperial history.

Begun as a pork-barrel project by the federal government in the early 1900s, the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians quickly became a dumping ground for inconvenient Indians. The federal institution in Canton, South Dakota, deprived many Native patients of their freedom without genuine cause, often requiring only the signature of a reservation agent. Without interpreters, mental evaluations, or therapeutic programs, few patients recovered. After three decades of complacency, a bitter fight to shut the asylum down was about to begin.

The World of Indigenous North America is a comprehensive look at issues that concern indigenous people in North America. Though no single volume can cover every tribe and every issue around this fertile area of inquiry, this book takes on the fields of law, archaeology, literature, socio-linguistics, geography, sciences, and gender studies, among others, in order to make sense of the Indigenous experience.

The Carlisle Indian School (1879-1918) was an audacious educational experiment. Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt, the school's founder and first superintendent, persuaded the federal government that training Native children to accept the white man's ways and values would be more efficient than fighting deadly battles. The result was that the last Indian war would be waged against Native children in the classroom.

This book presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation in critical areas in the Americas. An important contribution to evolving studies on conservation of sacred natural sites (SNS), the book elucidates the complexity of development scenarios within cultural landscapes related to the appropriation of religion, environmental change in indigenous territories, and new conservation management approaches. Indigeneity and the Sacred explores how these struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reconstituted as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.