Native American Heritage Month
November is Native American Heritage Month, a time to honor and celebrate the diverse cultures, traditions, and histories of Native peoples.
History
1491 (Second Edition) by
NATIONAL BESTSELLER Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man's first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.
ISBN: 9781400032051Publication Date: 2006-10-10
Boarding School Blues by
Like the figures in the ancient oral literature of Native Americans, children who lived through the American Indian boarding school experience became heroes, bravely facing a monster not of their own making. Sometimes the monster swallowed them up. More often, though, the children fought the monster and grew stronger. This volume draws on the full breadth of this experience in showing how American Indian boarding schools provided both positive and negative influences for Native American children. The boarding schools became an integral part of American history, a shared history that resulted in Indians "turning the power" by using their school experiences to grow in wisdom and benefit their people. The first volume of essays ever to focus on the American Indian boarding school experience, and written by some of the foremost experts and most promising young scholars of the subject, Boarding School Blues ranges widely in scope, addressing issues such as sports, runaways, punishment, physical plants, and Christianity. With comparative studies of the various schools, regions, tribes, and aboriginal peoples of the Americas and Australia, the book reveals both the light and the dark aspects of the boarding school experience and illuminates the vast gray area in between.
ISBN: 9780803294639Publication Date: 2006-09-01
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by
Now a special 30th-anniversary edition in both hardcover and paperback, the classic bestselling history "The New York Times" called "Original, remarkable, and finally heartbreaking...Impossible to put down" "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" is Dee Brown's eloquent, fully documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. A national bestseller in hardcover for more than a year after its initial publication, it has sold almost four million copies and has been translated into seventeen languages. For this elegant thirtieth-anniversary edition -- published in both hardcover and paperback -- Brown has contributed an incisive new preface. Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows the great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them demoralized and defeated. A unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee "changed forever our vision of how the West was really won.
ISBN: 0805066349Publication Date: 2001-01-23
Crazy Brave by
In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo, one of our leading Native American voices, details her journey to becoming a poet. Born in Oklahoma, the end place of the Trail of Tears, Harjo grew up learning to dodge an abusive stepfather by finding shelter in her imagination, a deep spiritual life, and connection with the natural world. She attended an Indian arts boarding school, where she nourished an appreciation for painting, music, and poetry; gave birth while still a teenager; and struggled on her own as a single mother, eventually finding her poetic voice. Narrating the complexities of betrayal and love, Crazy Brave is a memoir about family and the breaking apart necessary in finding a voice. Harjo's tale of a hardscrabble youth, young adulthood, and transformation into an award-winning poet and musician is haunting, unique, and visionary.
ISBN: 9780393073461Publication Date: 2012-07-09
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by
Beginning with the tribes' devastating loss of land and the forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools, he shows how the period of greatest adversity also helped to incubate a unifying Native identity. He traces how conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of their self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is an essential, intimate history - and counter-narrative - of a resilient people in a transformative era.
ISBN: 1594633150Publication Date: 2019-01-22
Lakota America by
The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America's history Named One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2019 * Named One of the 10 Best History Books of 2019 by Smithsonian Magazine * Winner of the MPIBA Reading the West Book Award for narrative nonfiction "All nations deserve to have their stories told with this degree of attentiveness."--Parul Sehgal, New York Times "A briliant, bold, gripping history."--Simon Sebag Montefiore, London Evening Standard, Best Books of 2019 Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. In this first complete account of the Lakota Indians Pekka Hämäläinen traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. He explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then--in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion--as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains. Deeply researched and engagingly written, this history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.
ISBN: 9780300215953Publication Date: 2019-10-22
Mankiller by
In this spiritual, moving autobiography, Wilma Mankiller, former Chief of the Cherokee Nation and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, tells of her own history while also honoring and recounting the history of the Cherokees. Mankiller's life unfolds against the backdrop of the dawning of the American Indian civil rights struggle, and her book becomes a quest to reclaim and preserve the great Native American values that form the foundation of our nation. Now featuring a new Afterword to the 2000 paperback reissue, this edition of Mankiller completely updates the author's private and public life after 1994 and explores the recent political struggles of the Cherokee Nation.
ISBN: 0312098685Publication Date: 1993-10-01
Trail of Tears by
Discusses the American government's nineteenth-century policy of Indian removal, in which over fifty tribes were relocated from their homelands to the West, from the perspective of the Native Americans.
ISBN: 0517146770Publication Date: 1995-08-06
Arts & Culture
The Encyclopedia of Native American Religions by
This comprehensive alphabetic reference of over 1,200 entries reveals the rich spiritual legacy of the native American nations, covering sacred sites, burial practices, spiritual leaders, traditional ceremonies, concepts of the afterlife, symbolism, dances and objects.
ISBN: 0816020175Publication Date: 1992-02-01
Gathering Moss by
Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a commonbut largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.
ISBN: 0870714996Publication Date: 2003-03-01
Possessions by
A timely re-examination of European engagements with indigenous art and the presence of indigenous art in the contemporary art world. The arts of Africa, Oceania and native America famously inspired twentieth-century modernist artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Ernst. The politics of such stimulus, however, have long been highly contentious: was this a cross-cultural discovery to be celebrated, or just one more example of Western colonial appropriation? This revelatory book explores cross-cultural art through the lens of settler societies such as Australia and New Zealand, where Europeans made new nations, displacing and outnumbering but never eclipsing native peoples. In this dynamic of dispossession and resistance, visual art has loomed large. Settler artists and designers drew upon Indigenous motifs and styles in their search for distinctive identities. Yet powerful Indigenous art traditions have asserted the presence of First Nations peoples and their claims to place, history and sovereignty. Cultural exchange has been a two-way process, and an unpredictable one: contemporary Indigenous art draws on global contemporary practice, but moves beyond a bland affirmation of hybrid identities to insist on the enduring values and attachment to place of Indigenous peoples.
ISBN: 9780500296592Publication Date: 2022-09-27
The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen by
2018 James Beard Award Winner: Best American Cookbook Named one of the Best Cookbooks of 2017 by NPR, The Village Voice, Smithsonian Magazine, UPROXX, New York Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Mpls. St. PaulMagazine and others Here is real food--our indigenous American fruits and vegetables, the wild and foraged ingredients, game and fish. Locally sourced, seasonal, "clean" ingredients and nose-to-tail cooking are nothing new to Sean Sherman, the Oglala Lakota chef and founder of The Sioux Chef. In his breakout book, The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, Sherman shares his approach to creating boldly seasoned foods that are vibrant, healthful, at once elegant and easy. Sherman dispels outdated notions of Native American fare--no fry bread or Indian tacos here--and no European staples such as wheat flour, dairy products, sugar, and domestic pork and beef. The Sioux Chef's healthful plates embrace venison and rabbit, river and lake trout, duck and quail, wild turkey, blueberries, sage, sumac, timpsula or wild turnip, plums, purslane, and abundant wildflowers. Contemporary and authentic, his dishes feature cedar braised bison, griddled wild rice cakes, amaranth crackers with smoked white bean paste, three sisters salad, deviled duck eggs, smoked turkey soup, dried meats, roasted corn sorbet, and hazelnut-maple bites. The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen is a rich education and a delectable introduction to modern indigenous cuisine of the Dakota and Minnesota territories, with a vision and approach to food that travels well beyond those borders.
ISBN: 9780816699797Publication Date: 2017-10-10
