The Overland Trail into the American West is one of the most culturally recognizable symbols of the American past: white covered wagons traversing the plains, filled with heroic pioneers embodying the nation's manifest destiny. In American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), University of Nevada assistant professor of history Sarah Keyes rewrites that well-worn story. Keyes book focuses on a topic that was at the forefront of the minds of those who traveled the train - death. 6,000 (or perhaps more) people died traveling West during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and in a nation where death rituals held strong symbolic meaning, the realities of dying on the trail were troubling to westward settlers. By looking at the trail through the lens of death, Keyes also includes other forms of, and institutions central to, western migration, namely Indian Removal and the US Army. American Burial Ground is a fresh look at a topic that many people think they know something about - historians will never look at westward migration the same way again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In his book, Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal(University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), Dr. Gregory D. Smithers effectively articulates the complex history of Native Southerners. Smithers conveys the history of Native Southerners through numerous historical eras while properly reinterpreting popular misconceptions about the past in a way that is compelling and easy to understand. Smithers expresses the rich and complex history of Native Southerners as it was while exposing the reality of settler colonialism and U.S. removal policies. As shown throughout the book, Native Southerners were constantly adapting to a changing world. But ultimately Native Southerners flourished, leading Smither to state, “My, how the architects of removal and assimilation failed.” Gregory D. Smithers is an American historian with a particular interest in the rich history of the Cherokee people, Indigenous history in the Southeast, and environmental history. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis. He has taught in California, Hawaii, Scotland, and Ohio. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, where he is a professor of American history and Eminent Scholar in the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University. Colin Mustful has an M.A. in history from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and is currently a candidate for an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Augsburg University. You can learn more about his work at his website: www.colinmustful.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907 (Utah State University Press, 2023) recovers the history of the Cherokee National Seminaries from scattered archives and colonized research practices by critically weaving together pedagogy and archival artifacts with Cherokee traditional stories and Indigenous worldviews. This unique text adds these voices to writing studies history and presents these stories as models of active rhetorical practices of assimilation resistance in colonized spaces. Emily Legg turns to the Cherokee medicine wheel and cardinal directions as a Cherokee rhetorical discipline of knowledge making in the archives, an embodied and material practice that steers knowledge through the four cardinal directions around all relations. Going beyond historiography, Legg delineates educational practices that are intertwined with multiple strands of traditional Cherokee stories that privilege Indigenous and matriarchal theoretical lenses. Stories of Our Living Ephemera synthesizes the connections between contemporary and nineteenth-century academic experiences to articulate the ways that colonial institutions and research can be Indigenized by centering Native American sovereignty. By undoing the erasure of Cherokee literacy and educational practices, Stories of Our Living Ephemera celebrates the importance of storytelling, especially to those who are learning about Indigenous histories and rhetorics. This book is of cultural importance and value to academics interested in composition and pedagogy, the Cherokee Nation, and a general audience seeking to learn about Indigenous rhetorical devices and Cherokee history. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

For western colonists in the early American backcountry, disputes often ended in bloodshed and death. Making the Frontier Man: Violence, White Manhood, and Authority in the Early Western Backcountry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) by Dr. Matthew C. Ward examines early life and the origins of lawless behaviour in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio from 1750 to 1815. It provides a key to understanding why the trans-Appalachian West was prone to violent struggles, especially between white men. Traumatic experiences of the Revolution and the Forty Years War legitimised killing as a means of self-defence—of property, reputation, and rights—transferring power from the county courts to the ordinary citizen. Backcountry men waged war against American Indians in state-sponsored militias as they worked to establish farms and seize property in the West. And white neighbours declared war on each other, often taking extreme measures to resolve petty disputes that ended with infamous family feuds. Making the Frontier Man focuses on these experiences of western expansion and how they influenced American culture and society, specifically the nature of western manhood, which radically transformed in the North American environment. In search of independence and improvement, the new American man was also destitute, frustrated by the economic and political power of his elite counterparts, and undermined by failure. He was aggressive, misogynistic, racist, and violent, and looked to reclaim his dominance and masculinity by any means necessary. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier (NYU Press, 2019), Ian Saxine, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater State University, shows the dynamic relationship between Native and English systems of property on the turbulent edge of Britain’s empire, and how so many colonists came to believe their prosperity depended on acknowledging Indigenous land rights. As absentee land speculators and hardscrabble colonists squabbled over conflicting visions for the frontier, Wabanaki Indians’ unity allowed them to forcefully project their own interpretations of often poorly remembered old land deeds and treaties. The result was the creation of a system of property in Maine that defied English law, and preserved Native power and territory. Eventually, ordinary colonists, dissident speculators, and grasping officials succeeded in undermining and finally destroying this arrangement, a process that took place in councils and courtrooms, in taverns and treaties, and on battlefields. Properties of Empire challenges assumptions about the relationship between Indigenous and imperial property creation in early America, as well as the fixed nature of Indian “sales” of land, revealing the existence of a prolonged struggle to re-interpret seventeenth-century land transactions and treaties well into the eighteenth century. The ongoing struggle to construct a commonly agreed-upon culture of landownership shaped diplomacy, imperial administration, and matters of colonial law in powerful ways, and its legacy remains with us today. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Today’s book is: Whiskey Tender: A Memoir (Harper, 2024), by Deborah Jackson Taffa, who was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents—citizens of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe—were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Assimilation meant relocation, but as Deborah Jackson Taffa matured into adulthood, she began to question the promise handed down by her elders and by American society: that if she gave up her culture, her land, and her traditions, she would not only be accepted, but would be able to achieve the “American Dream.”  Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Quechan (Yuma) reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Her childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. Pan-Indian, as well as specific tribal histories and myths, blend with stories of a 1970s and 1980s childhood spent on and off the reservation. Deborah Jackson Taffa offers a sharp and thought-provoking historical analysis laced with humor and heart. As she reflects on her past and present—the promise of assimilation and the many betrayals her family has suffered, both personal and historical; trauma passed down through generations—she reminds us of how the cultural narratives of her ancestors have been excluded from the central mythologies and structures of the “melting pot” of America, revealing all that is sacrificed for the promise of acceptance. Our guest is: Deborah Jackson Taffa, who is a citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo. She earned her MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and is the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, A Public Space, Salon, the Huffington Post, Prairie Schooner, The Best Travel Writing, and other outlets.  Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the creator of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore which stories we tell and what happens to those we don’t. Listeners may also be interested in this playlist: This discussion of the book A Calm and Normal Heart, with Chelsea T. Hicks The conversation about the book Night of the Living Rez, with Morgan Talty Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

“Is America an Empire?” is a popular question for pundits and historians, likely because it sets off such a provocative debate. All too often, however, people use empire simply because the United States is a hegemon, ignoring the country’s imperial traits to focus simply on its power. Dr. Daniel Immerwahr’s book How to Hide an Empire: The History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) corrects this by explicitly focusing on the country’s territories and territories overseas possessions. Dr. Immerwahr begins at the country’s founding as apprehension over aggressive westward settlement gave way to enthusiastic land grabs by pioneers such as Daniel Boone. Propelled by an astonishingly high birth rate and immigration, Euroamericans displaced indigenous peoples. In addition to this more familiar narrative, other factors drove territorial expansion. A desperate need for fertilizers led to the annexation of nearly one hundred “guano islands” in the Pacific and Caribbean, followed by the annexation of even more territory following the Spanish-American War in 1898. These new territories, including Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and others enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the United States: they did not enjoy constitutional protections but nevertheless had a close relationship with what they called the mainland. While the United States backed away from traditional colonialism after 1945, what emerged instead was a “pointillist empire” that depended on bases and new uses of older territory to function. Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

A gripping account of the violence and turmoil that engulfed England’s fledgling colonies and the crucial role played by Native Americans in determining the future of North America. In 1675, eastern North America descended into chaos. Virginia exploded into civil war, as rebel colonists decried the corruption of planter oligarchs and massacred allied Indians. Maryland colonists, gripped by fears that Catholics were conspiring with enemy Indians, rose up against their rulers. Separatist movements and ethnic riots swept through New York and New Jersey. Dissidents in northern Carolina launched a revolution, proclaiming themselves independent of any authority but their own. English America teetered on the edge of anarchy. Though seemingly distinct, these conflicts were in fact connected through the Susquehannock Indians, a once-mighty nation reduced to a small remnant. Forced to scatter by colonial militia, Susquehannock bands called upon connections with Indigenous nations from the Great Lakes to the Deep South, mobilizing sources of power that colonists could barely perceive, much less understand. Although the Susquehannock nation seemed weak and divided, it exercised influence wildly disproportionate to its size, often tipping settler societies into chaos. Colonial anarchy was intertwined with Indigenous power. Piecing together Susquehannock strategies from a wide range of archival documents and material evidence, Matthew Kruer shows how one people’s struggle for survival and renewal changed the shape of eastern North America. Susquehannock actions rocked the foundations of the fledging English territories, forcing colonial societies and governments to respond. Time of Anarchy recasts our understanding of the late seventeenth century and places Indigenous power at the heart of the story. Matthew Kruer is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago where he teaches early American history. John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He is the author of Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi (Univ. Press of Kansas, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Cynthia Sylvester's The Half-White Album (University of New Mexico Press 2023) is a collection of stories, flash fiction, and poems revolving around the journey of a travelling band, The Covers. The stories are songs on the album, beginning with “Live at the House of Towers,” about a woman’s memories of her mother and home. The story of Shima (and her husband Claude) begins with all of her six daughters being taken by missionaries. The 10-year-old youngest, whom she calls The Last One, and the missionaries call Ruth, keeps running away. Shima is afraid because the missionaries will teach them to forget the songs and stories of their people. In Live at the House at the Edge of the World, Ruth is grown and eating dinner with Albert. We meet Margarita, who was born with cerebral palsy and is confined to a wheelchair and a parade of other characters who struggle to love, live, and survive in a harsh world. These are stories of hope and despair, family and banishment, based out west in what was once the wide-ranging country of native American tribes. Cynthia Sylvester is born into the Kiyaa’áanii Clan for the Bilagáana Clan and is an enrolled member of the Diné. She is a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines. She received the Native Writer Award at the Taos Writer’s Conference. She graduated from the University of New Mexico and received her MFA in creative writing from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Cynthia hosts Albuquerque DimeStories—3-minute stories written and read by the author. Hosting DimeStories is a way to give back and foster a writing community. A community of writers is at the core of what she attributes to her success, endurance, and joy in writing. Writing is a solitary endeavor. “So much of what we writers write never sees the light of day.” A DimeStorie, fiction or non-fiction, is a way to have an achievable goal each month (about 500 words) and provides a venue to read the work to a receptive audience. Having a community of writers is important because Cynthia, like many writers, works a “9 to 5.” Her profession for over thirty years has been physical therapy. She comes from a line of “medicine women.” Her mother and aunts were nurses, and she and her sister have health professions. Cynthia’s career in medicine is often reflected in her work as a writer. When not working as a writer or a PT, Cynthia loves to box, take walks with her wife and their dog, Zeus, hang out with friends and family and talk about writing, TV shows, movies, books, sports, what happened last week or last year, whatever if there is a story involved, Cynthia is in her happy place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Food is at the center of everything, writes University of Washington professor of American Indian Studies Charlotte Coté. In A Drum in One Hand, A Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast (U Washington Press, 2022), Coté shares stories from her own experience growing up and living in the Pacific Northwest. From salmon, to wild berries, to community gardens, the food abundance of this region is central to Indigenous decolonization and sovereignty. Coté connects protecting the free movement and ecological health of salmon runs to issues as global as climate change, arguing that in order to understand the big picture, you need to start with what people put on their dinner tables. A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other is a book about resilience, healing, and sustenance in the face of challenges, and about the real, material, work people are doing to decolonize their diets and in doing so, healing the land and their communities. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and is the Assistant Director of the American Society for Environmental History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Amazonian Cosmopolitans: Navigating a Shamanic Cosmos, Shifting Indigenous Policies, and Other Modern Projects (U Nebraska Press, 2022), Suzanne Oakdale focuses on the autobiographical accounts of two Brazilian Indigenous leaders, Prepori and Sabino, Kawaiwete men whose lives spanned the twentieth century, when Amazonia increasingly became the context of large-scale state projects. Both give accounts of how they worked in a range of interethnic enterprises from the 1920s to the 1960s in central Brazil. Prepori, a shaman, also gives an account of his relations with spirit beings that populate the Kawaiwete cosmos as he participated in these projects. Like other Indigenous Amazonians, Kawaiwete value engagement with outsiders, particularly for leaders and shamanic healers. These social engagements encourage a careful watching and learning of others’ habits, customs, and sometimes languages, what could be called a kind of cosmopolitanism or an attitude of openness, leading to an expansion of the boundaries of community. The historical consciousness presented by these narrators centers on how transformations in social relations were experienced in bodily terms—how their bodies changed as new relationships formed. Amazonian Cosmopolitans offers Indigenous perspectives on twentieth-century Brazilian history as well as a way to reimagine lowland peoples as living within vast networks, bridging wide social and cosmological divides. Suzanne Oakdale is Professor of Anthropology at The University of New Mexico. She specializes in Brazil, with research focused on Amazonian indigenous peoples. She explores the dynamics of ritual practice; history; and the social anthropology of the person and personal experience, particularly how these genres reflect and are used to address large scale social shifts. She is the editor of the Journal of Anthropological Research. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Reckoning with Restorative Justice Hawaii Women's Prison Writing (Duke University Press, 2023), Dr. Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experiences of women incarcerated at the Women’s Community Correctional Center, the only women’s prison in Hawaii. Adopting a decolonial and pro-abolitionist lens, she focuses mainly on women’s participation in the Kailua Prison Writing Project and its accompanying Prison Monologues program. Trapedo Sims argues that while the writing project was a vital resource for the inside women, it also remained deeply embedded within carceral logics at the institutional, state, and federal levels. She foregrounds different aspects of these programs, such as the classroom spaces and the dynamics that emerged between performers and audiences in the Prison Monologues. Blending ethnography, literary studies, psychological analysis, and criminal justice critique, Trapedo Sims centers the often-overlooked stories of incarcerated Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women in Hawai‘i in ways that resound with the broader American narrative: the disproportionate incarceration of people of color in the prison-industrial complex. Rameen Mohammed is a community organizer based in Texas, a fellow for Muslim Counterpublics Lab, and a soon-to-be law student.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Scott Gac's Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America (Cambridge UP, 2023) investigates one of history's most violent undertakings: The United States of America. People the world over consider violence in the United States as measurably different than that which troubles the rest of the globe, citing reasons including gun culture, the American West, Hollywood, the death penalty, economic inequality, rampant individualism, and more. This compelling examination of American violence explains a political culture of violence from the American Revolution to the Gilded Age, illustrating how physical force, often centered on racial hierarchy, sustained the central tenets of American liberal government. It offers an important story of nationhood, told through the experiences and choices of civilians, Indians, politicians, soldiers, and the enslaved, providing historical context for understanding how violence has shaped the United States from its inception. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

By putting the Midwest at the center of Vast Early America, University of Illinois historian Robert Morrissey reconfigures the power dynamics in the story of North America during the era of colonialism. In his award-winning People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America (U Washington Press, 2022), Morrissey tells a story that centers the edge - the places where the vast American prairies meet the forests of the Great Lakes. This "ecotone" region is a zone of environmental wealth and dynamism, where successive Native societies were able to build powerful societies based on an understanding of the region's ecologies. Rather than European empires of eastern Native people like the Iroquois acting upon people at the center of the continent, Morrissey centers the Meskwaki, the Illiniwek, and other groups usually kept at the margins of the story. By combining ethnohistory, environmental history, and colonial history, People of the Ecotone tells a genuinely new story that shifts our perspective of who and what matters in early American history in unexpected ways. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and is the Assistant Director of the American Society for Environmental History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press, 2024), Dr. Marcy Norton offers a dramatic new interpretation of the encounter between Europe and the Americas that reveals the crucial role of animals in the shaping of the modern world. When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on October 12, 1492, the cultural differences between the two groups were vaster than the oceans that had separated them. There is perhaps no better demonstration than the divide in their respective ways of relating to animals. In this book, Dr. Norton tells a new history of the colonisation of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the centre of the story. She reveals that the encounters between European and Native American beliefs about animal life transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic. Europeans’ strategies and motives for conquest were inseparable from the horses that carried them in military campaigns and the dogs they deployed to terrorise Native peoples. Even more crucial were the sheep, cattle, pigs, and chickens whose flesh became food and whose skins became valuable commodities. Yet as central as the domestication of animals was to European plans in the Americas, Native peoples’ own practices around animals proved just as crucial in shaping the world after 1492. Cultures throughout the Caribbean, Amazonia, and Mexico were deeply invested in familiarisation: the practice of capturing wild animals—not only parrots and monkeys but even tapir, deer, and manatee—and turning some of them into “companion species.” These taming practices not only influenced the way Indigenous people responded to human and nonhuman intruders but also transformed European culture itself, paving the way for both zoological science and the modern pet. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Paul Radin was one of the founding generation of American cultural anthropologists: A student of Franz Boas,  and famed ethnographer of the Winnebago. Yet little is known about Radin's life. A leftist who was persecuted by the FBI and who lived for several years outside of the United States, and a bohemian who couldn't keep an academic job, there are many chapters in Radin's life which have not been told.  In Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race (Michigan State University Press, 2020), Jack Glazier tells the story of Radin's work at Fisk University in the late 1920s. During his three-year appointment, he and graduate student Andrew Polk Watson collected autobiographies and religious conversion narratives from elderly African Americans. That innovative, subject-centered research complemented like-minded scholarship by African American historians reacting against the disparaging portrayals of black people by white historians. In this book, Glazier describes Radin's commitment to documenting people's own stories as they told them and his respect for them as people as a form of 'radical humanism' and sets Paul Radin's findings within the broader context of Boasian anti-racism, African American culture, and his career-defining work among the Winnebago. In this episode of the podcast Jack Glazier talks to host Alex Golub about Radin and the Boasians, the influence of Charles S. Johnson at Fisk, and how contemporary activists might view the strengths and limitations of Radin's radical humanism.  Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In 1570's New Kingdom of Granada (modern Colombia), a new generation of mestizo (half-Spanish, half-indigenous) men sought positions of increasing power in the colony's two largest cities. In response, Spanish nativist factions zealously attacked them as unequal and unqualified, unleashing an intense political battle that lasted almost two decades. At stake was whether membership in the small colonial community and thus access to its most lucrative professions should depend on limpieza de sangre (blood purity) or values-based integration (Christian citizenship).  Max Deardoff's A Tale of Two Granadas: Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568–1668 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) examines the vast, trans-Atlantic transformation of political ideas about subjecthood that ultimately allowed some colonial mestizos and indios ladinos (acculturated natives) to establish urban citizenship alongside Spaniards in colonial Santafé de Bogotá and Tunja. In a spirit of comparison, it illustrates how some of the descendants of Spain's last Muslims appealed to the same new conceptions of citizenship to avoid disenfranchisement in the face of growing prejudice. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press 2020) is a forceful and captivating book that readers won’t be able to put down, and that listeners from all sort of backgrounds will definitely want to hear more about. Weaving together histories of Black communities (in the US and the Americas more broadly), Native Americans, and multiple Latin Americans countries, Briggs tells us how taking of children has been used as a strategy to terrorize communities that demand social justice and change. This book, timely as no other, asks readers to question the narrative that portrays taking children as something that is done in the benefit of the child, and instead to see it as a strategy that seeks to control and dominate communities that are deem dangerous to the social order. As Prof. Briggs tells us by the end of the interview, in this summer of racial reckoning the BLM movement has asked to eliminate the foster care system for this has been another vehicle for the policing and criminalization of African American communities in the United States. This demand has everything to do with the long history of talking children that is so thoroughly documented in this book. Yet this is not only a “History of American Terror” as the title suggests, it is also a history about how individuals, families, communities and organizations have resisted this terrorizing strategy. Make no mistake: this is not a story with a happy ending, still, it is one that teaches us that in our past lies both the ghostly hauntings that explain why taking children has been a strategy used for terror, but also why therein we can find the seeds to resistance and transformation. Definitely a must for these troubling and convoluted times. Bonus: Prof. Briggs’s son makes a short but hilarious appearance in our conversation. We have decided not to delete this portion of the interview because it demonstrates one of Prof. Briggs main scholarly arguments: the distinction between the private and public is illusory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

How did Native Americans make war, not with European settlers, but amongst themselves? Historian Wayne E. Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explores this often-neglected question in his book, The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2023).  The podcast begins with his explanation of the ‘cutting-off’ style of fight and retreat that characterized this method of warfare and proceeds to an understanding of the root causes of war among Native Americans including the imperative of “blood revenge.” Lee argues persuasively that wars among natives were endemic yet not of the “no-holds-barred” character of the European type. Also, unlike the Europeans, the Native Americans frowned on prisoner exchanges—prisoners, sometimes tortured, were seen as a measure of a campaign’s success—and the natives abjured rape of the enemy’s women as an allotted entitlement of war. Such important differences notwithstanding, The Cutting-Off Way also points to timeless principles in warfare, evident in today’s bloody conflicts, as when he writes: “The cultural mandate for revenge proved extremely difficult to overcome.” Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Health in the Highlands: Indigenous Healing and Scientific Medicine in Guatemala and Ecuador (University of California Press, 2023) explores how, in the early to mid-twentieth century, the governments of Ecuador and Guatemala sought to expand Western medicine within their countries, with the goals of addressing endemic diseases and improving infant and maternal health. These efforts often clashed with indigenous medical practices, particularly in the rural highlands. Drawing on extensive, original archival research, historian David Carey Jr. shows that indigenous populations embraced a syncretic approach to health, combining traditional and new practices. At times, the governments of both nations encouraged--or at least allowed--such a synthesis, yet they also attacked indigenous lifeways, going so far as to criminalize native medical practitioners and to conduct medical experiments on indigenous people without consent. Health in the Highlands traces the experiences of curanderos, midwives, bonesetters, witches, doctors, and nurses--and the indigenous people they served. Carey interrogates the relationship between 'progressive' public health policy and indigenous well-being, offering lessons from the past that remain relevant in the present. Our best way forward, this history suggests, may be a compassionate syncretism that joins indigenous approaches to healing with science and a pursuit of environmental and social justice. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

What do Tulsa, Santa Fe, and New Orleans have in common? When viewed from the perspective of Indigenous arts and culture, the answer is quite a bit. In Urban Homelands: Writing the Native City from Oklahoma (U Nebraska, 2023), Oklahoma State University professor of English Lindsey Claire Smith draws connections between Indigenous art, particularly writing, and these two cities to the east and west. By focusing on mobility between urban Native spaces, Smith shows how the vibrant arts scene in Tulsa has influenced artists in Indigenous homelands far removed from Oklahoma. By telling stories through fiction, visual art, and other media, Native artists claim these cities as urban homelands, linking together disparate places through the shared link of Indigeneity.  Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and is the Assistant Director of the American Society for Environmental History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

What if racism shared an origin with opposition to racism? What if the condemnation of injustice gave rise both to an early form of anti-racism and to the racial hierarchies that haunt the modern era? Rolena Adornol, David Orique, María Cristina Ríos Espinosa tell the story of how Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary to New Spain, came to racial consciousness in the presence of slavery. His intellectual rebellion spurred slavery’s apologists to more strident and sinister modes of defense – but also laid a lasting Christian groundwork for the fight against racial injustice.   Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Terence Sweeney, Assistant Teaching Professor, Honors College, Villanova University Featured Scholars:  Rolena Adorno, Sterling Professor Emerita of Spanish, Yale University María Cristina Ríos Espinosa, Professor of Arts, Humanities, and Culture, University of Sor Juana’s Cloister, Mexico City David Orique, Professor of History, Providence College Special thanks: Chiyuma Eliott, Michael Sawyer For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science after the War in the Woods (Duke University Press, 2023) by Dr. Tom Özden-Schilling explores the afterlives of several research initiatives that emerged in the wake of the “War in the Woods,” a period of anti-logging blockades in Canada in the late twentieth century. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among neighboring communities of White environmental scientists and First Nations mapmakers in northwest British Columbia, Dr. Özden-Schilling examines these researchers’ lasting investments and the ways they struggle to continue their work long after the loss of government funding. He charts their use of planning documents, Indigenous territory maps, land use plots, reports, and other documents that help them to not only survive institutional restructuring but to hold onto the practices that they hope will enable future researchers to continue their work. He also shows how their lives and aspirations shape and are shaped by decades-long battles over resource extraction and Indigenous land claims. By focusing on researchers’ experiences and personal attachments, Dr. Özden-Schilling illustrates the complex relationships between researchers and rural histories of conservation, environmental conflict, resource extraction, and the long-term legacies of scientific research. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

What is the “traditional American family?” Popular images from the colonial and pioneer past suggest an isolated and self-sufficient nuclear family as the center of American identity and the source of American strength. But the idea of early American self-sufficiency is a myth. Caro Pirri tells the story of the precarious Jamestown settlement and how its residents depended on each other and on Indigenous Americans for survival. Early American history can help us imagine new kinds of interdependent and multi-generational family structures as an antidote to the modern crisis of loneliness and alienation.  Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Caro Pirri, Assistant Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh Featured Scholars:  Jean Feerick, Professor of English, John Carroll University Steven Mentz, Professor of English, St. John’s University Special thanks: Molly Warsh For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860 (Norton, 2023) is a revealing history of the formative period when voices of dissent and innovation defied power and created visions of America still resonant today.  With so many of our histories falling into dour critique or blatant celebration, here is a welcome departure: a book that offers hope as well as honesty about the American past. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, and wars with Canada and Mexico. Mass immigration and powerful religious movements sent tremors through American society. But even as the powerful defended the status quo, others defied it: voices from the margins moved the center; eccentric visions altered the accepted wisdom, and acts of empathy questioned self-interest.  Edward L. Ayers’s rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, the Native American activist William Apess, and others to challenge entrenched practices and beliefs. So, Lydia Maria Child condemned the racism of her fellow northerners at great personal cost. Melville and Thoreau, Joseph Smith and Samuel Morse all charted new paths for America in the realms of art, nature, belief, and technology. It was Henry David Thoreau who, speaking of John Brown, challenged a hostile crowd "Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?" Through decades of award-winning scholarship on the Civil War, Edward L. Ayers has himself ventured beyond the interpretative status quo to recover the range of possibilities embedded in the past as it was lived. Here he turns that distinctive historical sensibility to a period when bold visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of dissent and innovation into the foundation of the nation. Those traditions remain alive for us today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Understanding and Teaching Native American History (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), co-edited by Kristofer Ray and Brady DeSanti, is a timely and urgently needed remedy to a long-standing gap in history instruction. While the past three decades have seen burgeoning scholarship in Indigenous studies, comparatively little of that has trickled into classrooms. This volume is designed to help teachers effectively integrate Indigenous history and culture into their lessons, providing richly researched content and resources across the chronological and geographical landscape of what is now known as North America.  Despite the availability of new scholarship, many teachers struggle with contextualizing Indigenous history and experience. Native peoples frequently find themselves relegated to historical descriptions, merely a foil to the European settlers who are the protagonists in the dominant North American narrative. This collection offers a way forward, an alternative framing of the story that highlights the ongoing integral role of Native peoples via broad coverage in a variety of topics including the historical, political, and cultural. With its scope and clarity of vision, suggestions for navigating sensitive topics, and a multitude of innovative approaches authored by contributors from multidisciplinary backgrounds, Understanding and Teaching Native American History will also find use in methods and other graduate courses. Nearly a decade in the conception and making, this is a groundbreaking source for both beginning and veteran instructors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Accounts of decolonization routinely neglect Indigenous societies in North America and Australasia, yet Native communities have made unique contributions to anticolonial thought and activism. David Myer Temin's book Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought (U Chicago Press, 2023) examines how twentieth-century Indigenous activists in North America debated questions of decolonization and self-determination, developing distinctive conceptual approaches that both resonate with and reformulate key strands in other civil rights and global decolonization movements. In contrast to decolonization projects that envisioned liberation through national independence, Indigenous theorists emphasized the self-determination of peoples against sovereign states and articulated a visionary politics of decolonization as care for the earth. Temin traces the interplay between anticolonial thought and practice across key indigenous thinkers. He shows how these insights broaden the political and intellectual horizons open to us today with respect to climate justice. Lachlan McNamee is a Lecturer of Politics at Monash University. His area of expertise is the comparative politics of settler colonialism, empire, and political violence with a regional focus on the Asia-Pacific. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

An ethnographic study based on decades of field research, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain: Nahua Sacred Journeys in Mexico's Huasteca Veracruzana (UP of Colorado, 2023) explores five sacred journeys to the peaks of venerated mountains undertaken by Nahua people living in northern Veracruz, Mexico. Punctuated with elaborate ritual offerings dedicated to the forces responsible for rain, seeds, crop fertility, and the well-being of all people, these pilgrimages are the highest and most elaborate form of Nahua devotion and reveal a sophisticated religious philosophy that places human beings in intimate contact with what Westerners call the forces of nature. Alan and Pamela Sandstrom document them for the younger Nahua generation, who live in a world where many are lured away from their communities by wage labor in urban Mexico and the United States. Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain contains richly detailed descriptions and analyses of ritual procedures as well as translations from the Nahuatl of core myths, chants performed before decorated altars, and statements from participants. Particular emphasis is placed on analyzing the role of sacred paper figures that are produced by the thousands for each pilgrimage. The work contains drawings of these cuttings of spirit entities along with hundreds of color photographs illustrating how they are used throughout the pilgrimages. The analysis reveals the monist philosophy that underlies Nahua religious practice in which altars, dancing, chanting, and the paper figures themselves provide direct access to the sacred. In the context of their pilgrimage traditions, the ritual practices of Nahua religion show one way that people interact effectively with the forces responsible for not only their own prosperity but also the very survival of humanity. A magnum opus with respect to Nahua religion and religious practice, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain is a significant contribution to several fields, including but not limited to Indigenous literatures of Mesoamerica, Nahuatl studies, Latinx and Chicanx studies, and religious studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The story of the British Empire is a familiar one: Britain came, it saw, it conquered, forging a glorious world empire upon which the sun never set. In fact, far from being the tale of a single nation imposing its will upon the world, the expanding British Empire frequently found itself frustrated by the power and tenacious resistance of the Indigenous and non-European people it encountered. From gruelling wars in Ireland to the failure to curtail North African Corsair states, all the way to the collapse of commercial operations in East Asia, British attempts to create an imperial enterprise often ended in disaster and even defeat.  In The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire (Ebury Press, 2023), David Veevers looks beyond the myths of triumph and into the realities of British misadventures in the early days of Empire, meeting the extraordinary Indigenous and non-European people across the world who were the real forces to be reckoned with. From the Indian Emperors who contained the nefarious ambitions of the East India Company, to the West African Kings who resisted British demands and set the terms of the trade in enslaved people, to the Paramount Chiefs in America who fought to expunge English colonists from their homelands, this book retells the history of early Empire from the all too familiar story of conquest to one of empowering defiance and resistance. David Veevers is Lecturer in Early Modern History at University of Bangor. He read History at the University of Kent, where he also completed his MA and earned his PhD in 2015. His thesis was a study of the English East India Company in South Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exploring in particular the way in which informal social networks shaped the formation of an early modern colonial state. He stayed at Kent to take up the position of Postdoctoral Associate before moving to Queen Mary, University of London, to undertake a 4-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the School of History in 2018. He joined the School of History, Law, and Social Sciences at the University of Bangor in 2022, where he teaches courses on seventeenth century England, early modern Asia, and global history more widely. Veevers is the author of numerous articles and his The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600 - 1750, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. With William A. Pettigrew he edited The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, 1550 – 1750 (Brill, 2018, Open Access). The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire came out in May 2023 with Penguin/Ebury. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In this interview James Fenelon discusses his new book entitled Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790, recently published with Routledge (2023). The book traces 500 years of European-American colonization and racialized dominance, expanding our common assumptions about the ways racialization was used to build capitalism and the modern world-system. Professor Fenelon draws on personal experience and the agency of understudied Native (and African) resistance leaders, to weave a story too often hidden or distorted in the annals of the academy, that remains invisible at many universities and historical societies.  Fenelon identifies three epochs of racial constructions, colonialism, and capitalism that created the USA. Indigenous nations, the first to be racialized on a global scale, African peoples, enslaved and brought to the Americas, and European immigrants. It offers a sweeping analysis of the forces driving the invasion, occupation, and exploitation of Native America and the significance of labor in American history provided by Indigenous people, Africans, and immigrants, specifically the Irish. Indian, Black and Irish makes major contributions toward a deeper understanding of where Supremacy and Sovereignty originated from, and how our modern world has used these socio-political constructions, to build global hegemony that now threatens our very existence through wars and climate change. It will be a vital resource to those studying history, colonialism, race and racism, labor history, and indigenous peoples. James Fenelon is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Indigenous Peoples Studies at California State University, San Bernardino. He is also currently the Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change at Swarthmore College. His books include Redskins? Sports Mascots, Indian Nations and White Racism, Indigenous Peoples and Globalization (with Thomas D. Hall), and Culturicide, Resistance and Survival of the Lakota (Sioux Nation). Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790, is published with Routledge Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The conquest of Indigenous land in the eastern United States through corrupt treaties and genocidal violence laid the groundwork for the conquest of the American West. In Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation (Random House, 2023), acclaimed author Peter Stark exposes the fundamental conflicts at play through the little-known but consequential struggle between two extraordinary leaders. William Henry Harrison was born to a prominent Virginia family, the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He journeyed west, became governor of the vast Indiana Territory, and sought statehood by attracting settlers and imposing one-sided treaties. Tecumseh, by all accounts one of the nineteenth century's greatest leaders, belonged to an honored line of Shawnee warriors and chiefs. His father, killed while fighting the Virginians flooding into Kentucky, extracted a promise from his sons to "never give in" to the land-hungry Americans. An eloquent speaker, Tecumseh traveled from Minnesota to Florida and west to the Great Plains convincing far-flung tribes to join a great confederacy and face down their common enemy. Eager to stop U.S. expansion, the British backed Tecumseh's confederacy in a series of battles during the forgotten western front of the War of 1812 that would determine control over the North American continent. Tecumseh's brave stand was likely the last chance to protect Indigenous people from U.S. expansion--and prevent the upstart United States from becoming a world power. In this fast-paced narrative--with its sharply drawn characters, high-stakes diplomacy, and bloody battles--Peter Stark brings this pivotal moment to life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Historian Alejandra Dubcovsky tells a story of war, slavery, loss, remembrance, and the women whose resilience and resistance transformed the colonial South. In exploring their lives she rewrites early American history, challenging the established male-centered narrative. In Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South (Yale UP, 2023), Dubcovsky reconstructs the lives of Native women—Timucua, Apalachee, Chacato, and Guale—to show how they made claims to protect their livelihoods, bodies, and families. Through the stories of the Native cacica who demanded her authority be recognized; the elite Spanish woman who turned her dowry and household into a source of independent power; the Floridiana who slapped a leading Native man in the town square; and the Black woman who ran a successful business at the heart of a Spanish town, Dubcovsky reveals the formidable women who claimed and used their power, shaping the history of the early South. Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Today’s book is Indigenous DC: Native Peoples and the Nation’s First Capital (Georgetown UP, 2023), by Dr. Elizabeth Rule, which is the first and fullest account of the suppressed history and continuing presence of Native Americans in Washington, DC. Washington, DC, is Indian land, but Indigenous peoples are often left out of the national narrative of the United States and erased in the capital city. To redress this myth of invisibility, Indigenous DC shines a light upon the oft-overlooked contributions of tribal leaders and politicians, artists and activists to the rich history of the District of Columbia, and their imprint—at times memorialized in physical representations, and at other times living on only through oral history—upon this place. Inspired by Dr. Elizabeth Rule’s award-winning public history mobile app and decolonial mapping project Guide to Indigenous DC, this book brings together the original inhabitants who call the District their traditional territory, the diverse Indigenous diaspora who has made community here, and the land itself in a narrative arc that makes clear that all land is Native land. The acknowledgment that DC is an Indigenous space inserts the Indigenous perspective into the national narrative and opens the door for future possibilities of Indigenous empowerment and sovereignty. This important book is a valuable and informational resource on both Washington, DC, regional history and Native American history. Our guest is: Dr. Elizabeth Rule, who is Assistant Professor of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University. She is an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. Her research on Indigenous issues has been featured in the Washington Post, Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien, The Atlantic, Newsy, and NPR. She has published scholarly articles in the American Quarterly and in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal; and is the author of Indigenous DC: Native Peoples and the Nation’s Capital (Georgetown University Press). Beyond the classroom, Dr. Rule continues her work as an educator by presenting her research and delivering invited talks on Native American issues. Dr. Rule has held posts as Director of the Center for Indigenous Politics and Policy and Faculty in Residence at George Washington University, Director of the Native American Political Leadership Program and the INSPIRE PreCollege Program, MIT Indigenous Communities Fellow, Postdoctoral Fellow at American University, and Ford Foundation Fellow. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in American Studies from Brown University, and her B.A. from Yale University. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer and show-host of the Academic Life podcasts. She holds a Ph.D. in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey--and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 175+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The Republic Will Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression (University of Illinois Press, 2023) by Dr. Tariq D. Khan examines the long relationship between America’s colonising wars and virulent anticommunism. The colonising wars against Native Americans created the template for anticommunist repression in the United States. Dr. Khan’s analysis reveals bloodshed and class war as foundational aspects of capitalist domination and vital elements of the nation’s long history of internal repression and social control. Dr. Khan shows how the state wielded the tactics, weapons, myths, and ideology refined in America’s colonising wars to repress anarchists, labour unions, and a host of others labelled as alien, multi-racial, multi-ethnic urban rabble. The ruling classes considered radicals of all stripes to be anticolonial insurgents. As Dr. Khan charts the decades of red scares that began in the 1840s, he reveals how capitalists and government used much-practised counterinsurgency rhetoric and tactics against the movements they perceived and vilified as “anarchist.” This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Today’s book is A Calm and Normal Heart: Stories (The Unnamed Press, 2022) by Chelsea T. Hicks. The heroes of A Calm and Normal Heart are modern-day adventurers—seeking out new places to call their own inside a nation to which they do not entirely belong. A member of the Osage tribe, Hicks’ stories are compelled by an overlooked diaspora happening inside America itself: that of young Native people. In stories like “Superdrunk,” “Tsexope,” and “Wets’a,” iPhone lifestyles co-mingle with ancestral connection, strengthening relationships or pushing people apart, while generational trauma haunts individual paths. Broken partnerships and polyamorous desire signal a fraught era of modern love, even as old ways continue to influence how people assess compatibility. In “By Alcatraz,” a Native student finds herself alone on campus over Thanksgiving break, seeking out new friendships during a national holiday she does not recognize. Leaping back in time, “A Fresh Start Ruined” inhabits the life of Florence, an Osage woman attempting to hide her origins while social climbing in midcentury Oklahoma. And in “House of RGB” a young professional settles into a new home, intent on claiming her independence after a break-up, even if her ancestors can’t seem to get out of her way. Whether in between college semesters or jobs, on the road to tribal dances or escaping troubled homes, characters occupy a complicated and often unreliable terrain. Our guest is: Chelsea T. Hicks, who is a Wahzhazhe writer and citizen of the Osage Nation. She holds an MA from UC Davis and an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her writing has been published in The Paris Review, Poetry, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. A Calm and Normal Heart is her first book. It was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection and received a 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma on ancestral land. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. She is the producer and show-host of the Academic Life podcasts. Listeners to this episode may be interested in: Institute of American Indian Arts National Book Foundation Becoming the Writer You Already Are, by Michelle Boyd This conversation with Morgan Talty about Night of the Living Rez Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey--and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 175+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Today’s guest is Edgar Garcia. Garcia’s new book Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Emergency takes nine words—“birds,” “wealth,” “caves,” “television,” “demons,” “migrations,” “love,” “the sun,” and “Mormons”—and weaves a rich transhistorical narrative about the Popul Vuh sacred narrative. In these pages, Garcia explores how this text emerged in conditions of historical violence and persisted through over three hundred years, becoming a touchstone for Mesoamerican religious studies, decolonial activism, and literary adaptation. Edgar Garcia is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. His previous books are Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019). He has also served as the guest editor of Fence, a literary magazine. Written during the COVID pandemic, Emergency was published in 2022. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.  Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

As the enduring "last frontier," Alaska proves an indispensable context for examining the form and function of American colonialism, particularly in the shift from western continental expansion to global empire. In this richly theorized work, Juliana Hu Pegues evaluates four key historical periods in U.S.-Alaskan history: the Alaskan purchase, the Gold Rush, the emergence of salmon canneries, and the World War II era. In each, Hu Pegues recognizes colonial and racial entanglements between Alaska Native peoples and Asian immigrants. In the midst of this complex interplay, the American colonial project advanced by differentially racializing and gendering Indigenous and Asian peoples, constructing Asian immigrants as "out of place" and Alaska Natives as "out of time." Counter to this space-time colonialism, Native and Asian peoples created alternate modes of meaning and belonging through their literature, photography, political organizing, and sociality. Offering an intersectional approach to U.S. empire, Indigenous dispossession, and labor exploitation, Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements (UNC Press, 2021) makes clear that Alaska is essential to understanding both U.S. imperial expansion and the machinations of settler colonialism. Juliana Hu Pegues is associate professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The history of the American West has typically been told in one of two ways: as triumph, or as tragedy. Stephen Aron, accomplished scholar of the West, Professor Emeritus at UCLA, and President of the Autry Museum of the American West, argues that both of these narratives flatten out what was actually a much more complicated story.  Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West (Oxford UP, 2022), Aron zooms in on several moments of contingency in the Western past, moments when people of often radically different backgrounds came together to build community, or at least lived peacefully, despite their differences. Although these moments eventually fell apart, Aron argues that they show that the past was unwritten until it came to pass, and that our own uncertain future is the same. Peace and Friendship offers important lessons about the power of history and contingency, and underscores the unsettled nature of human events and our capacity for overcoming even our deepest differences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River provides electricity for some forty million people, and is one of the largest sources of water in the American West. It is also a testament to American settler colonialism, writes UT Austin history professor Erika Bsumek in The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau (U Texas Press, 2023). This region of the Southwest has been inhabited and irrigated by Indigenous societies since time immemorial, groups which were only recently (and partially) dispossessed by LDS Church settlers and by the US government. Bsumek argues that the structures, both physical and social, which form the foundation of Glen Canyon Dam - including science, law, and religion - make it a blueprint for structural dispossession, and a model which the United States would use to claim valuable Native lands. Yet, a mammoth undertaking such as this cannot be built without massive environmental change, and from the very beginning, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike have questioned whether the dam was even necessary at all. In an era of warming climates and increasing droughts, Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam explains how we arrived at this moment of water crisis, and points to a path into an as-yet untapped future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) examines the competing versions of manhood at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School between 1879 and 1918. Students often arrived at Carlisle already engrained with Indigenous ideals of masculinity. On many occasions these ideals would come into conflict with the models of manhood created by the school’s original superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt believed that Native Americans required the “embrace of civilization,” and he emphasized the qualities of self-control, Christian ethics, and retaliatory masculinity. He encouraged sportsmanship and fair play over victory. Pratt’s successors, however, adopted a different approach, and victory was enshrined as the main objective of Carlisle sports. As major stars like Jim Thorpe and Lewis Tewanima came to the fore, this change in approach created a conflict over manhood within the school: should the competitive athletic model be promoted, or should Carlisle focus on the more self-controlled, Christian ideal as promoted by the school’s Young Men’s Christian Association? The answer came from the 1914 congressional investigation of Carlisle. After this grueling investigation, Carlisle’s model of manhood starkly reverted to the form of the Pratt years, and by the time the school closed in 1918, the school’s standards of masculinity had come full circle. Bennett Koerber is a senior research associate at Taylor Research Group. He can be reached at bennettkoerber@taylorresearchgroup.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Five hundred years ago, a flotilla landed on the coast of Yucatán under the command of the Spanish conquistador Hérnan Cortés. While the official goal of the expedition was to explore and to expand the Christian faith, everyone involved knew that it was primarily about gold and the hunt for slaves. That a few hundred Spaniards destroyed the Aztec empire--a highly developed culture--is an old chestnut, because the conquistadors, who had every means to make a profit, did not succeed alone. They encountered groups such as the Tlaxcaltecs, who suffered from the Aztec rule and were ready to enter into alliances with the foreigners to overthrow their old enemy. In addition, the conquerors benefited from the diseases brought from Europe, which killed hundreds of thousands of locals.  Drawing on both Spanish and indigenous sources, this account of the conquest of Mexico from 1519 to 1521 not only offers a dramatic narrative of these events--including the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and the flight of the conquerors--but also represents the individual protagonists on both sides, their backgrounds, their diplomacy, and their struggles. It vividly portrays the tens of thousands of local warriors who faced off against each other during the fighting as they attempted to free themselves from tribute payments to the Aztecs. Written by a leading historian of Latin America, Conquistadors and Aztecs: A History of the Fall of Tenochtitlan (Oxford UP, 2023) offers a timely portrayal of the fall of Tenochtitlan and the founding of an empire that would last for centuries. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Quinoa's new status as a superfood has altered the economic fortunes of Quechua farmers in the Andean highlands. Linda J. Seligmann journeys to the Huanoquite region of Peru to track the mixed blessings brought about by the surging worldwide popularity of this "exquisite grain." Focusing on how Indigenous communities have confronted globalization, Seligmann examines the influence of food politics, development initiatives, and the region's agrarian history on present-day quinoa production among Huanoquiteños. She also looks at the human stories behind these transformations, from the work of quinoa brokers to the ways Huanoquite's men and women navigate the shifts in place and power occurring in their homes and communities. Finally, Seligmann considers how the consequences of nearby mining may impact Huanoquiteños' ability to farm quinoa and thrive in their environment, and the efforts they are taking to resist these threats to their way of life.  The untold story behind the popular health food, Quinoa: Food Politics and Agrarian Life in the Andean Highlands (U Illinois Press, 2022) illuminates how Indigenous communities have engaged with the politics and policies surrounding their production of a traditional and minor crop that became a global foodstuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives--the first slaves transported into California--and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California's carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls were sold in caged brothels in early San Francisco. Indian boarding schools supplied new farms and hotels with unfree child workers. By looking west to California, Jean Pfaelzer upends our understanding of slavery as a North-South struggle and reveals how the enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. In unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California gorged on slavery, an appetite that persists today in a global trade in human beings lured by promises of jobs but who instead are imprisoned in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows, or sold as nannies and sex workers. California, a Slave State (Yale UP, 2023) shreds California's utopian brand, rewrites our understanding of the West, and redefines America's uneasy paths to freedom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Eighty years on, Lin Poyer's book War at the Margins: Indigenous Experiences in World War II (U Hawaii Press, 2022) offers a global and comparative view of the impact of World War II on Indigenous societies. Indigenous peoples, Poyer shows, had a distinct experience of WWII, as those on the margins of Allied and Axis empires and nation-states were drawn in as soldiers, scouts, guides, laborers, and victims. Using historical and ethnographic sources, Poyer examines how Indigenous communities emerged from the trauma of the wartime era with social forms and cultural ideas that laid the foundations for their twenty-first-century emergence as players on the world’s political stage. This book is available open access here. Lin Poyer is a cultural anthropologist and professor emerita at the University of Wyoming. Holger Droessler is an Assistant Professor of History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on the intersection of empire and labor in the Pacific. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Today’s book is: The Lost Journals of Sacajewea (Milkweed Editions, 2023), by Debra Magpie Earling, which is a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea. Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery.  In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history. Raised among the Lemhi Shoshone, in this telling the young Sacajewea is bright and bold, growing strong from the hard work of “learning all ways to survive”: gathering berries, water, roots, and wood; butchering buffalo, antelope, and deer; catching salmon and snaring rabbits; weaving baskets and listening to the stories of her elders. When her village is raided and her beloved Appe and Bia are killed, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper. Heavy with grief, Sacajewea learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world teeming with fur trappers and traders. When Lewis and Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer and commodify the world she loves. Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance—the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told. Keywords from today’s episode include: Sacajewea, Agai River, Appe, Bia, Charbonneau, Lewis and Clark, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, Otter Woman, Pop Pank, MMIW, Lemhi Shoshone, Shoshone, Mandan, Hidasta. Today’s guest is: Debra Magpie Earling, who is the author of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. An earlier version of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea was written in verse and produced as an artist book during the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. She has received both a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She retired from the University of Montana where she was named professor emeritus in 2021. She is Bitterroot Salish. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a freelance book editor. She has served as content director and producer of the Academic Life podcast since she launched it in 2020. The Academic Life is proud to be an academic partner of the New Books Network. Listeners to this episode may be interested in: Perma Red, by Debra Magpie Earling Sacred Wilderness, by Susan Power Grass Dancer, by Susan Power Night of the Living Rez, by Morgan Talty Indian Horse, by Richard Wagamese Embers, by Richard Wagamese Listeners may also be interested in: This podcast with Morgan Talty discussing Night of the Living Rez This podcast with Michelle Cyca about Misrepresentation on Campus This podcast with the editor of Tribal Colleges Journal of American Indian Higher Education This podcast on The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature Welcome to the Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life. Missed any of the 150+ Academic Life episodes? You can find them all archived here. And check back soon: we’re in the studio preparing more episodes for your academic journey—and beyond! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

With the publication of her most recent novel, White Horse, Erika T. Wurth breaks from the realism that characterized her earlier fiction and ventures into horror. White Horse follows Kari, an urban Native living in Denver, as a family heirloom belonging to her long-missing mother launches her into a world of the uncanny: ghosts and monsters lurch into real life and portals transport her into scenes from the past that reveal traumatic family secrets. Wurth speaks with critic Leif Sorensen and host Rebecca Evans about what abides at the intersection of politics and craft, and what’s at stake in particular for the Indigenous writers of genre fiction whose work takes shape at that intersection. Their conversation pokes serious fun at everything from the faltering literary truism that being good at plot is somehow less impressive than being good at characterization to debates over authenticity in Native literature. Horror, as Wurth describes it, offers real and meaningful pleasures, solves the craft problems of over exposition, and opens up powerful questions of identity, politics, and history. Tune in for recommendations for genre writers from the emerging Fifth Wave of Indigenous fiction, reflections on orality and linguistics, and Wurth’s cure for “writer’s depression” instead of writer’s block! Mentions Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio Tattered Cover Book Store Talking Scared Podcast Stanley Hotel Red Power movement and the American Indian Movement Tommy Orange’s There, There Water protectors Idle No More Black Lives Matter Astrophil Press The Writer’s Chronicle Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter Save the Cat! Erika T. Wurth’s “The Fourth Wave” and “The Fourth Wave in Native American Fiction” David Treuer’s Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual  Wurth also references and recommends a number of genre writers, from romance to speculative literature to crime fiction to horror and beyond. Check out her picks, including B. L. Blanchard, V. Castro, Kelli Jo Ford, Lev Grossman, Grady Hendrix, Brandon Hobson, Marlon James, Jessica Johns, Stephen Graham Jones, Stephen King, Victor LaValle, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Danica Nava, Rebecca Roanhorse, and David Heska Wanbli Weiden! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Indigenous thinker and leader, Ailton Krenak, exposes the destructive tendencies of our ‘civilization’ in Life is not Useful  (Polity, 2023), which is translated by Jamille Pinheiro Dias & Alex Brostoff. The problematic symptoms of our modernity include rampant consumerism, environmental devastation, and a narrow and restricted understanding of humanity’s place on this Earth. For many centuries, Brazil’s Indigenous peoples have bravely faced threats of total annihilation and, in extremely adverse conditions, have reinvented their lives and communities.  At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the rest of the world to reconsider its lifestyle, Ailton Krenak’s clear and urgent thinking emerges with newfound impact and offers a vital perspective on the enormous challenges we face today: the ravages of the pandemic and the devastation caused by global warming, to name just two. Krenak questions the value of going back to normal when ‘normal’ is a vision of humanity divorced from nature, actively destroying the planet and digging deep trenches of inequality between peoples and societies. The ‘civilized’ world insists on giving life a purpose but life is not ‘useful’ and ‘civilization’ is not destiny. We must learn to embrace the joy of living life to its fullest, and inhabit the stillness that comes with not always being useful. In the wake of the pandemic, we have an opportunity to create deep and meaningful change in the way we live: this, more than ever, is a time to listen to voices that are one with the body of the Earth. Takeshi Morisato is philosopher and sometimes academic. He is the editor of the European Journal of Japanese Philosophy. He specializes in comparative and Japanese philosophy but he is also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories (Duke University Press, 2023) Daniel Ruiz-Serna follows the afterlives of war, showing how they affect the variety of human and nonhuman beings that compose the region of Bajo Atrato: the traditional land of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples. Attending to Colombia’s armed conflict as an experience that resounds in the lives and deaths of people, animals, trees, rivers, and spirits, Ruiz-Serna traces a lasting damage that brought Indigenous peoples to compel the Colombian government to legally recognize their territories as victims of war. Although this recognition extends transitional justice into new terrains, Ruiz-Serna considers the collective and individual wounds that continue unsettling spirits, preventing shamans from containing evil, attracting jaguars to the taste of human flesh, troubling the flow of rivers, and impeding the ability of people to properly deal with the dead. Ruiz-Serna raises potent questions about the meanings of justice, the forms it can take, and the limits of human-rights frameworks to repair the cosmic order that war unravels when it unsettles more-than-human worlds—causing forests to run amok. Daniel Ruiz-Serna is Lecturer of Anthropology at Dawson College. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

What if Hawai'i wasn't the 50th state? In Pacific Confluence: Fighting Over the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Hawai'i (U California Press, 2022), UCSD assistant professor Christen Sasaki argues that the years 1893-1898 marked a pivotal and understudied moment in Hawai'ian history. After the coup led by white oligarchs which overthrew Queen Liliuokalani and the Hawai'ian monarchy, the island chain became the center of international focus and competition, particularly between the empires of Japan and the United States, both of which vied for hegemony and control over Hawai'i's bountiful plantations. Questions about whiteness and race, labor, and immigration are at the center of this history, which recasts the story of Hawai'ian annexation as not an inevitable march of American expansion, but instead as a moment of contingency, which shows just how many possible branches any given historical moment can have. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Timothy R. Pauketat’s Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America (Oxford UP, 2023) is a sweeping account of what happened when Indigenous peoples of Medieval North and Central America confronted climate change. Few Americans today are aware of one of the most consequential periods in North American history—the Medieval Warm Period of seven to twelve centuries ago (AD 800-1300 CE)—which resulted in the warmest temperatures in the northern hemisphere since the "Roman Warm Period," a half millennium earlier. Reconstructing these climatic events and the cultural transformations they wrought, Pauketat guides readers down ancient American paths walked by Indigenous people a millennium ago, some trod by Spanish conquistadors just a few centuries later. The book follows the footsteps of priests, pilgrims, traders, and farmers who took great journeys, made remarkable pilgrimages, and migrated long distances to new lands. Along the way, readers discover a new history of a continent that, like today, was being shaped by climate change—or controlled by ancient gods of wind and water. Through such elemental powers, the history of Medieval America was a physical narrative, a long-term natural and cultural experience in which Native people were entwined long before Christopher Columbus arrived or Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztecs. Spanning from North to Central America, Gods of Thunder focuses on remarkable parallels between pre-contact American civilizations separated by a thousand miles or more. Key archaeological sites are featured in every chapter, leading us down an evidentiary trail toward the book's conclusion that a great religious movement swept Mesoamerica, the Southwest, and the Mississippi valley, sometimes because of worsening living conditions and sometimes by improved agricultural yields thanks to global warming a thousand years ago. The author also includes a guide to visiting the archaeological sites discussed in each chapter of the book. Sarah Newman (@newmantropologa) is an archaeologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research explores long-term human-environmental interactions, including questions of waste and reuse, processes of landscape transformation, and relationships between humans and other animals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (U Nebraska Press, 2023) renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations. Unprecedented exploration uncovered the West’s extraordinary resources, beginning with the discovery of gold in California within days of the United States acquiring the territory following the Mexican-American War. As those resources were developed, often by the most modern methods and through modern corporate enterprise, half of the contiguous United States was physically transformed. Continental Reckoning guides the reader through the rippling, multiplying changes wrought in the western half of the country, arguing that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life. As the West was acquired, integrated into the nation, and made over physically and culturally, the United States shifted onto a course of accelerated economic growth, a racial reordering and redefinition of citizenship, engagement with global revolutions of science and technology, and invigorated involvement with the larger world. The creation of the West and the emergence of modern America were intimately related. Neither can be understood without the other. With masterful prose and a critical eye, West presents a fresh approach to the dawn of the American West, one of the most pivotal periods of American history. Andrew R. Graybill is professor of history and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (Liveright, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770-1842 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Elizabeth Elbourne traces the history of three linked imperial families in Britain and across contested colonial borderlands from 1770 to 1842. Dr. Elbourne tracks the Haudenosaunee Brants of northeastern North America from the American Revolution to exile in Canada; the Bannisters, a British family of colonial administrators, whistleblowers and entrepreneurs who operated across Australia, Canada and southern Africa; and the Buxtons, a family of British abolitionists who publicized information about what might now be termed genocide towards Indigenous peoples while also pioneering humanitarian colonialism. By recounting the conflicts that these interlinked families were involved in she tells a larger story about the development of British and American settler colonialism and the betrayal of Indigenous peoples. Through an analysis of the changing politics of kinship and violence, Dr. Elbourne sheds new light on transnational debates about issues such as Indigenous sovereignty claims, British subjecthood, violence, land rights and cultural assimilation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The Paraguayan Chaco is a settler frontier where cattle ranching and agrarian extractivism drive some of the world's fastest deforestation and most extreme land tenure inequality. Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay's Chaco (U California Press, 2023) shows that environmental racism cannot be reduced to effects of neoliberalism but stems from long-standing social-spatial relations of power rooted in settler colonialism. Historically dispossessed of land and exploited for their labor, Enxet and Sanapaná Indigenous peoples nevertheless refuse to abide settler land control. Based on long-term collaborative research and storytelling, Joel E. Correia shows that Enxet and Sanapaná dialectics of disruption enact environmental justice by transcending the constraints of settler law through the ability to maintain and imagine collective lifeways amidst radical social-ecological change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Between 1902 and 1934, the United States confined hundreds of adults and children from dozens of Native nations at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a federal psychiatric hospital in South Dakota. But detention at the Indian Asylum, as families experienced it, was not the beginning or end of the story. For them, Canton Asylum was one of many places of imposed removal and confinement, including reservations, boarding schools, orphanages, and prison-hospitals. Despite the long reach of institutionalization for those forcibly held at the Asylum, the tenacity of relationships extended within and beyond institutional walls. In Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and Beyond Institutions (UNC Press, 2021), Susan Burch tells the story of the Indigenous people—families, communities, and nations, across generations to the present day—who have experienced the impact of this history. Drawing on oral history interviews, correspondence, material objects, and archival sources, Burch reframes the histories of institutionalized people and the places that held them. Committed expands the boundaries of Native American history, disability studies, and U.S. social and cultural history generally. Susan Burch is a professor of American Studies. Before joining the Middlebury faculty in 2009, she taught at Gallaudet University, King’s College (University of Aberdeen, Scotland), and the Ohio State University. Professor Burch also has worked as a research associate at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. She earned her BA degree in history and Soviet Studies from Colorado College and her MA and PhD in American and Soviet history from Georgetown University. Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

For almost fifty years, coal dominated the Navajo economy. But in 2019 one of the Navajo Nation’s largest coal plants closed. This comprehensive new work offers a deep dive into the complex inner workings of energy shift in the Navajo Nation. In Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation (University of Arizona Press, 2023) geographer Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation, examines the history of coal development within the Navajo Nation, including why some Diné supported coal and the consequences of doing so. He explains the Navajo Nation’s strategic choices to use the coal industry to support its sovereignty as a path forward in the face of ongoing colonialism. Carbon Sovereignty demonstrates the mechanism of capitalism through colonialism and the construction of resource sovereignty, in both the Navajo Nation’s embrace and its rejection of a coal economy. For the people of the Navajo Nation, energy sovereignty is dire and personal. Thanks to on-the-ground interviews with Diné coal workers, environmental activists, and politicians, Curley documents the real consequences of change as they happened. While some Navajo actors have doubled down for coal, others have moved toward transition. Curley argues that political struggles ultimately shape how we should understand coal, capitalism, and climate change. The rise and fall of coal magnify the nuance and complexity of change. Historical and contemporary issues intermingle in everyday life with lasting consequences. Andrew Curley is a member of the Navajo Nation and an assistant professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. Twitter. Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The Lakȟóta are among the best-known Native American peoples. In popular culture and even many scholarly works, they were once lumped together with others and called the Sioux. This book tells the full story of Lakȟóta culture and society, from their origins to the twenty-first century, drawing on Lakȟóta voices and perspectives. In Lakȟóta culture, "listening" is a cardinal virtue, connoting respect, and here authors Rani-Henrik Andersson and David C. Posthumus listen to the Lakȟóta, both past and present. The history of Lakȟóta culture unfolds in this narrative as the people lived it.  The book opens with an origin story, that of White Buffalo Calf Woman (Ptesanwin) and her gift of the sacred pipe to the Lakȟóta people. Drawing on winter counts, oral traditions and histories, and Lakȟóta letters and speeches, the narrative proceeds through such periods and events as early Lakȟóta-European trading, the creation of the Great Sioux Reservation, Christian missionization, the Plains Indian Wars, the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee (1890), the Indian New Deal, and self-determination, as well as recent challenges like the #NoDAPL movement and management of Covid-19 on reservations. This book centers Lakȟóta experience, as when it shifts the focus of the Battle of Little Bighorn from Custer to fifteen-year-old Black Elk, or puts American Horse at the heart of the negotiations with the Crook Commission, or explains the Lakȟóta agenda in negotiating the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1851. The picture that emerges--of continuity and change in Lakȟóta culture from its distant beginnings to issues in our day--is as sweeping and intimate, and as deeply complex, as the lived history it encompasses. Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez es profesor de Historia en Texas State University. Sus intereses académicos incluyen la etnohistoria, los pueblos indígenas de las Grandes Llanuras y el Suroeste de EE.UU., la frontera México-EE.UU. y la América hispánica. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

A “deeply researched and bracing retelling” (Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian) of the American Revolution, showing how the Founders were influenced by overlooked Americans—women, Native Americans, African Americans, and religious dissenters. Using more than a thousand eyewitness records, Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution (Simon and Schuster, 2021) is a “spirited account” (Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution) that explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers. “It is all one story,” prizewinning historian Woody Holton writes. Holton describes the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution from Lexington and Concord to the British surrender at Yorktown, always focusing on marginalized Americans—enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women, and dissenters—and on overlooked factors such as weather, North America’s unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease. Thousands of enslaved Americans exploited the chaos of war to obtain their own freedom, while others were given away as enlistment bounties to whites. Women provided material support for the troops, sewing clothes for soldiers and in some cases taking part in the fighting. Both sides courted native people and mimicked their tactics. Liberty Is Sweet is a “must-read book for understanding the founding of our nation” (Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin), from its origins on the frontiers and in the Atlantic ports to the creation of the Constitution. Offering surprises at every turn—for example, Holton makes a convincing case that Britain never had a chance of winning the war—this majestic history revivifies a story we thought we already knew. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O'Brien's book Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege (U Minnesota Press, 2021) collects more than two dozen chronicles of white imperialism and Indigenous resistance. Ranging from the historical to the contemporary and grappling with Indigenous land struggles around the globe, these narratives showcase both scholarly and creative forms of expression, constructing a multifaceted book of diverse perspectives that will inform readers while provoking them toward further research into Indigenous resilience. John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020. His forthcoming book, Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi (University Press of Kansas), will be out in December 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Bill Fowler, Chair of The New England Quarterly Board of Directors, and author David Naumec discuss his article "From Mashantucket to Appomattox: The Native American Veterans of Connecticut's Volunteer Regiments and the Union Army". The article appears in the December 2008 issue of The New England Quarterly. The conversation was recorded at the MIT Press on December 12, 2008. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

What does “development” mean for Indigenous peoples? Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands (U Arizona Press, 2022) lays out an alternative path showing that conscious attention to relationships among humans and the natural world creates flourishing social-ecological economies.  Economist Ronald L. Trosper draws on examples from North and South America, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia to argue that Indigenous worldviews centering care and good relationships provide critical and sustainable economic models in a world under increasing pressure from biodiversity loss and climate change. He explains the structure of relational Indigenous economic theory, providing principles based on his own and others’ work with tribal nations and Indigenous communities. Trosper explains how sustainability is created at every level when relational Indigenous economic theory is applied—micro, meso, and macro. Good relationships support personal and community autonomy, replacing the individualism/collectivism dichotomy with relational leadership and entrepreneurship. Basing economies on relationships requires changing governance from the top-down approaches of nation-states and international corporations; instead, each community creates its own territorial relationships, creating plurinational relational states. This book offers an important alternative to classic economic theory. In Indigenous Economics, support for Indigenous communities’ development and Indigenous peoples’ well-being go hand-in-hand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe (Knopf, 2023) by Dr. Caroline Dodds Pennock presents a landmark work of narrative history that shatters our Eurocentric understanding of the Age of Discovery. We have long been taught to presume that modern global history began when the “Old World” encountered the “New”, when Christopher Columbus “discovered” America in 1492. But, as Dr. Pennock conclusively shows in this groundbreaking book, for tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others—enslaved people, diplomats, explorers, servants, traders—the reverse was true: they discovered Europe. For them, Europe comprised savage shores, a land of riches and marvels, yet perplexing for its brutal disparities of wealth and quality of life, and its baffling beliefs. The story of these Indigenous Americans abroad is a story of abduction, loss, cultural appropriation, and, as they saw it, of apocalypse. From the Brazilian king who met Henry VIII to the Aztecs who mocked up human sacrifice at the court of Charles V; from the Inuk baby who was put on show in a London pub to the mestizo children of Spaniards who returned “home” with their fathers; from the Inuit who harpooned ducks on the Avon river to the many servants employed by Europeans of every rank: here are a people who were rendered exotic, demeaned, and marginalized, but whose worldviews and cultures had a profound impact on European civilization. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In this podcast episode, Greg Marchildon interviews Indigenous rights litigator Jean Teillet on her book The Northwest is our Mother: The story of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation published by Harper Collins in 2019. Covering the evolution of the Métis as a people and nation since the 1790s, Teillet presents us with an highly crafted epic narrative. The great-grandniece of Louis Riel, the author is a very well-known Indigenous rights litigator who has appeared in twelve separate cases before the Supreme Court of Canada. She is also  a visual artist who has also worked as a writer, dancer, actor, choreographer, director and producer. Currently, she is Senior Counsel to the law firm Pape Salter Teillet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Spanning a century of fraught history, Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia: Powhatan People and the Color Line (University of Oklahoma Press, 2022) by Dr. Laura J. Feller describes the critical strategic work that tidewater Virginia Indians, descendants of the seventeenth-century Algonquian Powhatan chiefdom, undertook to sustain their Native identity in the face of deep racial hostility from segregationist officials, politicians, and institutions. Like other Southeastern Native groups living under Jim Crow regimes, tidewater Native groups and individuals fortified their communities by founding tribal organizations, churches, and schools; they displayed their Indianness in public performances; and they enlisted whites, including well-known ethnographers, to help them argue for their Native distinctness. Describing an arduous campaign marked by ingenuity, conviction, and perseverance, Dr. Feller shows how these tidewater Native people drew on their shared histories as descendants of Powhatan peoples, and how they strengthened their bonds through living and marrying within clusters of Native Virginians, both on and off reservation lands. She also finds that, by at times excluding African Americans from Indian organizations and Native families, Virginian Indians themselves reinforced racial segregation while they built their own communities. Even as it paved the way to tribal recognition in Virginia, the tidewater Natives’ sustained efforts chronicled in this book demonstrate the fluidity, instability, and persistent destructive power of the construction of race in America. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

At the turn of the twentieth century, the US government viewed education as one sure way of civilizing “others” under its sway—among them American Indians and, after 1898, Filipinos. Teaching Empire: Native Americans, Filipinos, and Us Imperial Education 1879-1918 (UP of Kansas, 2019) considers how teachers took up this task, first at the Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Pennsylvania, opened in 1879, and then in a school system set up amid an ongoing rebellion launched by Filipinos. Drawing upon the records of fifty-five teachers at Carlisle and thirty-three sent to the Philippines—including five who worked in both locations—the book reveals the challenges of translating imperial policy into practice, even for those most dedicated to the imperial mission. These educators, who worked on behalf of the US government, sought to meet the expectations of bureaucrats and supervisors while contending with leadership crises on the ground. In their stories, Elisabeth Eittreim finds the problems common to all classrooms—how to manage students and convey knowledge—complicated by their unique circumstances, particularly the military conflict in the Philippines. Eittreim’s research shows the dilemma presented by these schools’ imperial goal: “pouring in” knowledge that purposefully dismissed and undermined the values, desires, and protests of those being taught. To varying degrees these stories demonstrate both the complexity and fragility of implementing US imperial education and the importance of teachers’ own perspectives. Entangled in US ambitions, racist norms, and gendered assumptions, teachers nonetheless exhibited significant agency, wielding their authority with students and the institutions they worked for and negotiating their roles as powerful purveyors of cultural knowledge, often reinforcing but rarely challenging the then-dominant understanding of “civilization.” Examining these teachers’ attitudes and performances, close-up and in-depth over the years of Carlisle’s operation, Eittreim’s comparative study offers rare insight into the personal, institutional, and cultural implications of education deployed in the service of US expansion—with consequences that reach well beyond the imperial classrooms of the time. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

During the Cold War, U.S. intervention in Latin American politics, economics, and society grew in scope and complexity, with diplomatic legacies evident in today's hemispheric policies. Development became a key form of intervention as government officials and experts from the United States and Latin America believed that development could foster hemispheric solidarity and security. In parts of Latin America, its implementation was especially intricate because recipients of these programs were diverse Indigenous peoples with their own politics, economics, and cultures. Contrary to project planners' expectations, Indigenous beneficiaries were not passive recipients but actively engaged with development interventions and, in the process, redefined racialized ideas about Indigeneity.  In On Our Own Terms: Development and Indigeneity in Cold War Guatemala (UNC Press, 2022), Sarah Foss illustrates how this process transpired in Cold War Guatemala, spanning democratic revolution, military coups, and genocidal civil war. Drawing on previously unused sources such as oral histories, anthropologists' field notes, military records, municipal and personal archives, and a private photograph collection, Foss analyzes the uses and consequences of development and its relationship to ideas about race from multiple perspectives, emphasizing its historical significance as a form of intervention during the Cold War. Rachel Grace Newman is a historian of modern Mexico with particular interests in migration, childhood and youth studies, and social inequality. She is Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes (Equinox Publishing, 2022) edited by Molly H. Bassett and Natalie Avalos aims to answer many of the questions that come to mind when we think about the religious lives of Native and Indigenous peoples of the world. Scholars from many fields answer dozens of questions about a wide variety of specific Indigenous religious traditions and an array of the ideas, practices, and beliefs many people associate with them. Do Native peoples have “creator Gods?” What is shamanism? Why are there so many spellings of “voodoo?” Is Paganism considered an Indigenous religious tradition? The volume also interrogates the concept of “Indigenous religious traditions,” by asking what the phrase means in relation to the larger fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies and Religious Studies, whether all religions were at some point “indigenous,” and what the value of studying Indigenous religious traditions is today. Specialists respond to questions like these and many others in easily accessible language and provide references for further exploration, making this volume useful for personal study or classroom use. Because each chapter can be read in about five minutes, the books offer ideal supplementary resources in classrooms or an engaging read for those curious about the world around them. Molly Bassett is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. Her first book The Fate of Earthly Things, a study of Aztec gods and god-bodies, was published by the University of Texas Press in 2015. She is currently at work on a second book tentatively titled The Bundle: Unwrapping Aztec Religion, an examination of the quimilli (bundle) and tlaquimilolli (sacred bundle) as models for theory and method in the study of Aztec religion. Natalie Avalos is an Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies in the Ethnic Studies department at University of Colorado Boulder, which sits within Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Territories. Her work explores urban Native and Tibetan refugee religious life as decolonial praxis. She takes an endogenous approach to Indigenous life to write about land-based logics, the embodiment of colonialism as historical trauma, and the liberatory and healing possibilities of engaging intersubjective realities. She is a Chicana of Apache descent, born and raised in the Bay Area. This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada–United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford UP, 2021), is the recipient of the AHA’s Albert Corey Prize in the history of Canadian–American relations. In A Line of Blood and Dirt, Benjamin Hoy shows how the US-Canadian border was built across Indigenous lands. He explores the experiences of various indigenous groups, European settlers, African Americans, and Chinese immigrants.  Benjamin Hoy is an assistant professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan, where he directs the Historical GIS Lab. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Feeling down about museums? We have so many reasons to, but Chris Newell, Tribal Community Member-in-Residence at UConn and Director of Education at the Akomawt Educational Initiative, gives a dose of optimism about the future of museums. Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website. Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod Alexis L. Boylan is the director of academic affairs of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) and an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Art and Art History Department and the Africana Studies Institute Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Today’s book is: The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, which is the 2022 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award Winner. The Diné Reader showcases the breadth, depth, and diversity of Diné creative artists and their poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose, in a wide-ranging anthology. The collected works display a rich variety of and creativity in themes: home and history; contemporary concerns about identity, historical trauma, and loss of language; and economic and environmental inequalities. The Diné Reader developed as a way to demonstrate both the power of Diné literary artistry and the persistence of the Navajo people. The volume opens with a foreword by poet Sherwin Bitsui, who offers insight into the importance of writing to the Navajo people. The editors then introduce the volume by detailing the literary history of the Diné people, establishing the context for the tremendous diversity of the works that follow, which includes free verse, sestinas, limericks, haiku, prose poems, creative nonfiction, mixed genres, and oral traditions reshaped into the written word. This volume combines an array of literature with illuminating interviews, biographies, and photographs of the featured Diné writers and artists. A valuable resource to educators, literature enthusiasts, and beyond, this anthology is a much-needed showcase of Diné writers and their compelling work. The volume also includes a chronology of important dates in Diné history by Jennifer Nez Denetdale, as well as resources for teachers, students, and general readers by Michael Thompson. The Diné Reader is an exciting convergence of Navajo writers and artists with scholars and educators. Our guest is: Esther G. Belin, who is a Diné multimedia artist and writer, and a faculty mentor in the Low Rez MFA program at the Institute for American Indian Arts. She graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts and the University of California, Berkeley. Her poetry collection From the Belly of My Beauty won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her latest collection is Of Cartography: Poems. Our co-guest is: Jeff Berglund, who is the director of the Liberal Studies Program and a professor of English at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has worked since 1999. Dr. Berglund’s research and teaching focuses on Native American literature, comparative Indigenous film, and U.S. multi-ethnic literature. His books include Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop (co-editor), and Indigenous Peoples Rise Up: The Global Ascendancy of Social Media Activism (co-editor). Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: The Institute of American Indian Arts Esther Belin’s poems on the Poetry Foundation website, including Bringing Hannah Home and When Roots Are Exposed and Blues-ing on the Brown Vibe Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush This podcast with Morgan Talty discussing Night of the Living Rez This podcast with Michelle Cyca about Misrepresentation on Campus This podcast with the editor of Tribal Colleges Journal of American Indian Higher Education Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week, where we learn directly from experts. We embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are informed and inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In the early twenty-first century Bolivian social movements made streets, plazas, and highways into the decisively important spaces for acting politically, rivaling and at times exceeding voting booths and halls of government. The Sovereign Street documents this important period, showing how indigenous-led mass movements reconfigured the politics and racial order of Bolivia from 1999 to 2011.  Drawing on interviews with protest participants, on-the-ground observation, and documentary research, activist and scholar Carwil Bjork-James provides an up-close history of the indigenous-led protests that changed Bolivia. At the heart of the study is a new approach to the interaction between protest actions and the parts of the urban landscape they claim. These “space-claiming protests” both communicate a message and exercise practical control over the city. Bjork-James interrogates both protest tactics—as experiences and as tools—and meaning-laden spaces, where meaning is part of the racial and political geography of the city.  Taking the streets of Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz as its vantage point, The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia (U Arizona Press, 2020) offers a rare look at political revolution as it happens. It documents a critical period in Latin American history, when protests made headlines worldwide, where a generation of pro-globalization policies were called into question, and where the indigenous majority stepped into government power for the first time in five centuries. Brad Wright is a historian of Latin America specializing in postrevolutionary Mexico. He teach world history at Kennesaw State University currently. PhD in Public History with specialization in oral history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras (Stanford UP, 2022), Christopher A. Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. Using a combination of participant observation, courtroom ethnography, and archival research, Loperena reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority. The book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways Black dispossession and displacement are carried forth through the conferral of individual rights and freedoms, a prerequisite for resource exploitation under contemporary capitalism. By demanding to be accounted for on their terms, Garifuna anchor Blackness to Central America—a place where Black peoples are presumed to be nonnative inhabitants—and to collective land rights. Steeped in Loperena's long-term activist engagement with Garifuna land defenders, this book is a testament to their struggle and to the promise of "another world" in which Black and Indigenous peoples thrive. Christopher A. Loperena is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. You can find the article discussed during this conversation, published in American Anthropologist, here. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban anthropology, futurity, care, and migration. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has always been globally situated, argues Montana State history professor Amanda Hendrix-Komoto in Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific (U Nebraska, 2022). Through mission work, polygamous marriage, and extensive kinship networks, LDS members sought to create Zions - holy Mormon spaces - throughout the world through relationships with Indigenous people from the Intermountain West to Tahiti and the Hawai'ian islands. This process found both successful conversions, as well as pain and violence, since despite LDS insistence that they offered an alternative to American settler colonialism, often church members could be just as imperially-minded as their non-Mormon peers. Nonetheless, Hendrix-Komoto argues that the history of Indigenous people and the LDS Church is complex, and cannot be understood without placing a uniquely Mormon idea of the family at the very center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In far northeastern Alaska lies one of the most remarkable, and contested, places in North America: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This coastal arctic region is a place of great natural beauty, ecological importance, as well as being home and birthplace of the Gwich'in people. It's also thought to contain massive fossil fuel wealth, making it a site of fifty years and more political contestation.  In the award-winning book, Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, An Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice (UNC Press: 2021), Finis Dunaway explains how Indigenous people teamed up with the activist, photographer, and jazz drummer Lenny Kohm to build a grassroots movement to protect this sacred place from extractive industry. Using a humble photo slide show, Kohm and other activists, both Native people from the region and outsiders, marshaled the power of everyday people to convince critical and powerful actors that this was a place that deserved federal protection. While this fight is ongoing, Dunaway's book shows that sometimes power can be found in unexpected places, and that environmental history is not a simple story of decline and hopelessness. Defending the Arctic Refuge website and teaching tools are here. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, “new western” historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner’s frontier is no more, the West continues to present America with challenging processes to wrestle, navigate, and overcome. The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (U Nebraska Press, 2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink, takes stories of the late twentieth-century “modern West” and carefully pulls them toward the present—explicitly tracing continuity with or unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s. Considering a broad range of topics, including environment, Indigenous peoples, geography, migration, and politics, these essays straddle multiple modern frontiers, not least of which is the temporal frontier between our unsettled past and uncertain future. These forays into the twenty-first-century West will inspire more scholars to pull histories to the present and by doing so reinsert scholarly findings into contemporary public awareness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Common understandings drawn from biblical references, literature, and art portray deserts as barren places that are far from God and spiritual sustenance. In our own time, attention focuses on the rigors of climate change in arid lands and the perils of the desert in the northern Mexican borderlands for migrants seeking shelter and a new life. Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain (U Arizona Press, 2022) foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous peoples in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico, for whom the desert was anything but barren or empty. Instead, they nurtured and harvested the desert as a bountiful and sacred space. Drawing together historical texts and oral testimonies, archaeology, and natural history, author Cynthia Radding develops the relationships between people and plants and the ways that Indigenous people sustained their worlds before European contact through the changes set in motion by Spanish encounters, highlighting the long process of colonial conflicts and adaptations over more than two centuries. This work reveals the spiritual power of deserts by weaving together the cultural practices of historical peoples and contemporary living communities, centered especially on the Yaqui/Yoeme and Mayo/Yoreme. Radding uses the tools of history, anthropology, geography, and ecology to paint an expansive picture of Indigenous worlds before and during colonial encounters. She re-creates the Indigenous worlds in both their spiritual and material realms, bringing together the analytical dimension of scientific research and the wisdom of oral traditions in its exploration of different kinds of knowledge about the natural world. Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Why do we feel the need to belong, and what happens when we don’t? This episode explores: What it takes to belong. Why it physically hurts to be excluded. How perspective-gathering can help create more inclusion. A Discussion of the book Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides. Today’s book is: Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides, by Dr. Geoffrey Cohen, which explores how we became so alienated from one another, the physical and emotional costs of exclusion, and what we can do to create belonging even in polarized times. Dr. Cohen applies his and others’ groundbreaking research to offer solutions for improving daily life at work, in school, in our homes, and in our communities. We all feel a deep need to belong, but most of us don’t fully appreciate that need in others. Small acts of connection such as reflecting on our core values, and a suite of practices that Cohen defines as “situation-crafting,” can lessen polarization, improve performance in school and work, and unleash the potential in ourselves and in our relationships. Our guest is: Professor Geoffrey Cohen, whose research examines processes that shape people's sense of belonging and self and implications for social problems. He studies the big and small threats to belonging and self-integrity that people encounter in school, work, and health care settings, and strategies to create more inclusive spaces for people from all walks of life. He believes that the development of psychological theory is facilitated not only by descriptive and observational research but by theory-driven intervention. He has long been inspired by Kurt Lewin's quip, "The best way to try to understand something is to try to change it." Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: Brady, S. T., Cohen, G. L., Jarvis, S. N., & Walton, G. M. (2020). A brief social-belonging intervention in college improves adult outcomes for black Americans. Science Advances, 6(18), eaay3689. Connor, Alice. How To Human: An Incomplete Manual for Living in a Mess-up World. Frank Martela, A Wonderful Life: Insights on Finding a Meaningful Existence. Milam, L. A., Cohen, G. L., Mueller, C., & Salles, A. (2019). Stereotype threat and working memory among surgical residents (vol 216, pg 824, 2018). American Journal of Surgery, 218(3), 668. Welcome to The Academic Life! On the Academic Life channel we embrace a broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Find us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Harvard University Press, 2022 for paperback edition), Samuel J. Redman, Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, uncovers the equally fascinating and disturbing history behind the vast collections of human remains assembled by medical and natural history museums since the mid-nineteenth-century across the United States. The book shows how, in the aftermaths of the Civil War, human remains, and especially those of Indigenous people, were seen as valuable specimens for the advancement of medicine, before turning into crucial pieces of evidence for scientific racism, and eventually serving as material for the study and exhibition of human prehistory. Bone Rooms charts the trouble waters of the birth and evolution of bone rooms and offers a most timely historical account, as debates around the restitution of human remains and cultural artifacts held in museums have been gaining momentum in the recent years. Behind this important past lies the profound question of how to ensure that the quest for scientific knowledge does not, even if inadvertently, erase the humanity or cultural value of what have been seen as specimens only. As Redman advocates, “Museums can serve as key spaces to attempt to come to terms with the colonial legacy attached to archaeology and anthropology, through partially redressing past wrongs while continuing the search for new knowledge.” Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) tackles questions of Native power past and present and provides a fresh examination of the formidable and resilient Native nations—including Biloxis, Choctaws, Chitimachas, Chickasaws, Houmas, Mobilians, and Tunicas—who helped shape the modern Gulf South. In The Great Power of Small Nations, Elizabeth N. Ellis (Peoria) tells the stories of the many smaller Native American nations that shaped the development of the Gulf South. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, Ellis’s narrative chronicles how diverse Indigenous peoples—including Biloxis, Choctaws, Chitimachas, Chickasaws, Houmas, Mobilians, and Tunicas—influenced and often challenged the growth of colonial Louisiana. The book centers on questions of Native nation-building and international diplomacy, and it argues that Native American migration and practices of offering refuge to migrants in crisis enabled Native nations to survive the violence of colonization. Indeed, these practices also made them powerful. When European settlers began to arrive in Indigenous homelands at the turn of the eighteenth century, these small nations, or petites nations as the French called them, pulled colonists into their political and social systems, thereby steering the development of early Louisiana. In some cases, the same practices that helped Native peoples withstand colonization in the eighteenth century, including frequent migration, living alongside foreign nations, and welcoming outsiders into their lands, have made it difficult for their contemporary descendants to achieve federal acknowledgment and full rights as Native American peoples. The Great Power of Small Nations tackles questions of Native power past and present and provides a fresh examination of the formidable and resilient Native nations who helped shape the modern Gulf South. John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Most of what people think they know about Texas history is wrong, argues Bucknell University history professor Paul Barba in Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery in the Texas Borderlands (U Nebraska Press, 2021). Setting out to write a book on Texas history that didn't mention The Alamo, Barba instead views the region's past through the lenses of borderlands analysis, slavery and captivity, and anti-Blackness, to paint a very different picture than the Texas of popular memory. From the sixteenth century onwards, Texas was defined by captivity and kinship, two mutually constitutive sides of the same story. In a place where no one group - Spanish, Comanche, Anglo - could easily take the upper hand of power, all sides needed unfree people to perform colonial labor and conduct diplomacy across cultures. Slavery became critical to the region's history from the earliest days of colonization, and only deepened as Texas grew into an extension of the enslaved economy of the cotton south. Rather than a land of democratic freedom, the Texas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is defined by captivity and struggle between colonized, colonizers, and those caught in between. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Antonio T. Bly had collected and edited hundreds of advertisements offering a reward for enslaved Native Americans who run away from their masters. Escaping Slavery: A Documentary History of Native American Runaways in British North America (Lexington Books, 2022) captures the lives of numerous individuals who refused to sacrifice their humanity in the face of the violent, changing landscapes of early America. The documents reveal much about the strategies of resistance, but also about the fears and anxieties of the white men who viewed Native American women and men as their property. Antonio T. Bly holds the Peter H. Shattuck Endowed Chair in Colonial American History at California State University, Sacramento. Dr. Bly earned his Ph.D. in American Studies at College of William & Mary in Williamsburg in 2006. He then joined the faculty of Appalachian State University in 2007. For a decade he was the Director of the Africana Studies program. In 2019, he joined the Department of History at Sacramento State University. His previous books include Escaping Servitude: A Documentary History Runaway Servants in Colonial Virginia. Co-authored with Tamia Haygood. Lexington Books, 2015 and Escaping Bondage: A Documentary History of Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century New England, 1700-1789. Lexington Books; 2012. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Working with a group of over fifty students at the Little Wound School in Kyle, South Dakota, Mark Hetzel collected countless hours of oral history interviews with Oglala Lakota people on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Mark and his students then turned those interviews into a 7-part audio series that attempts to piece together the long and complicated story of the Lakota oyate, or nation, through the voices of local elders and community members. These are available in the form of a podcast called the “Heart of All Oral History Project.” As Mark’s students write on the Heart of All website, “We see this project as an opportunity to finally tell our own story, to set the record straight, and to be reminded, by our own relatives, where we came from and who we really are.” Framed as a conversation between community elders and students at the Little Wound School, the podcast series reflects the oral storytelling tradition that represents how Lakota people traditionally passed their knowledge from one generation to the next. But this process was interrupted by the US Federal Government’s assimilationist policies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which punished Lakota people from speaking their language or practicing their traditional culture in boarding schools and other institutions of settler colonialism. By providing a space for Lakota people to tell their own history in their own voices, this oral history project thus represents a profound statement of Indigenous sovereignty and Lakota resistance to the epistemic imperialism of the United States. It is also a rich resource for non-Native people who are interested to learn more about the violent history of settler colonialism, the immense courage and steadfast resilience of Lakota people, as well as the beauty, creativity, and humor that characterizes Lakota culture. This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here. If you want to learn more about the Heart of All Oral History Project, please go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

As globalisation continues languages are disappearing faster than ever, leaving our planet's linguistic diversity leaping towards extinction. The science of how languages are acquired is becoming more advanced and the internet is bringing us new ways of teaching the next generation, however it is increasingly challenging for minority languages to survive in the face of a handful of hegemonic 'super-tongues'. In Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language (Zed Books, 2021), James Griffiths reports from the frontlines of the battle to preserve minority languages, from his native Wales, Hawaii and indigenous American nations, to southern China and Hong Kong. He explores the revival of the Welsh language as a blueprint for how to ensure new generations are not robbed of their linguistic heritage, outlines how loss of indigenous languages is the direct result of colonialism and globalisation and examines how technology is both hindering and aiding the fight to prevent linguistic extinction. Introducing readers to compelling characters and examining how indigenous communities are fighting for their languages, Griffiths ultimately explores how languages hang on, what happens when they don't, and how indigenous tongues can be preserved and brought back from the brink. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Jeremy Duperteis Bangs, a leading expert in the history of the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony, overturns stereotypes with exciting new analyses of colonial and Native life in Plymouth Colony, of religious toleration, and of historical memory. New Light on the Old Colony: Plymouth, the Dutch Context of Toleration, and Patterns of Pilgrim Commemoration (Brill, 2019) brings together a wealth of insights that will surely benefit anyone interested in the origins of New England's first colony.  Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

How does identity and experience inform your writing? This episode explores: Professor Talty’s journey from community college student to college professor. The importance of supportive mentors and professors. Using identity and experience ethically in fiction and nonfiction. Why finding the right form for your story matters. A discussion of the book Night of the Living Rez. Our guest is: Professor Morgan Talty, who is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation where he grew up. He is the author of the story collection Night of the Living Rez from Tin House Books, and his work has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, LitHub, and elsewhere. A winner of the 2021 Narrative Prize, Talty’s work has been supported by the Elizabeth George Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts (2022). Talty is an Assistant Professor of English in Creative Writing and Native American and contemporary Literature at the University of Maine, Orono, and he is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in creative writing as well as the Institute of American Indian Arts. Professor Talty is also a Prose Editor at The Massachusetts Review. He lives in Levant, Maine. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: A Calm and Normal Heart by Chelsea T. Hicks The Removed by Brandon Hobson There There by Tommy Orange Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot The Lesser Blessed by Richard Van Camp Welcome to The Academic Life! We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The Texas Revolution has long been cast as an epic episode in the origins of the American West. As the story goes, larger-than-life figures like Sam Houston, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis fought to free Texas from repressive Mexican rule. In Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas (Basic Books, 2022), historian Sam Haynes reveals the reality beneath this powerful creation myth. He shows how the lives of ordinary people—white Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and those of African descent—were upended by extraordinary events over twenty-five years. After the battle of San Jacinto, racial lines snapped taut as a new nation, the Lone Star republic, sought to expel Indians, marginalize Mexicans, and tighten its grip on the enslaved. This is a revelatory and essential new narrative of a major turning point in the history of North America. Andrew R. Graybill is professor of history and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (Liveright, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The Seven Circles: Indigenous Teachings for Living Well, by Chelsey Luger and Thosh Collins, was published by HarperOne in 2022. In this honest and intentional book, Luger and Collins takes us out of capitalism and into indigenous territory to learn what true wellness means. In this revolutionary self-help guide, two beloved Native American wellness activists offer wisdom for achieving spiritual, physical, and emotional wellbeing rooted in Indigenous ancestral knowledge. When wellness teachers and husband-wife duo Chelsey Luger and Thosh Collins founded their Indigenous wellness initiative, Well for Culture, they extended an invitation to all to honor their whole self through Native wellness philosophies and practices. In reclaiming this ancient wisdom for health and wellbeing—drawing from traditions spanning multiple tribes—they developed the Seven Circles, a holistic model for modern living rooted in timeless teachings from their ancestors. Luger and Collins have introduced this universally adaptable template for living well to Ivy league universities and corporations like Nike, Adidas, and Google, and now make it available to everyone in this wise guide. The Seven Circles model comprises interconnected circles that keep all aspects of our lives in balance, functioning in harmony with one another. They are food, movement, sleep, ceremony, sacred space, land, community In The Seven Circles, Luger and Collins share intimate stories from their life journeys growing up in tribal communities, from the Indigenous tradition of staying active and spiritually centered through running and dance, to the universal Indigenous emphasis on a light-filled, minimalist home to create sacred space. Along the way, Luger and Collins invite readers to both adapt these teachings to their lives as well as do so without appropriating and erasing the original context, representing a critical new ethos for the wellness space. Each chapter closes with practical advice on how to engage with the teachings, as well as wisdom for keeping that particular circle in harmony with the others. With warmth and generosity—and 75 atmospheric photographs by Collins throughout—The Seven Circles teaches us how to connect with nature, with our community, and with ourselves, and to integrate ancient Indigenous philosophies of health and wellbeing into our own lives to find healing and balance. Meg Gambino is an artist and activist currently working as the Client and Community Relations Manager at a local nonprofit focused on ending hunger in North Penn. Her life mission is to creatively empower others by modeling reconciliation between communities of people and people on the margins. Find her on Instagram @megambino. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The story of the Thirteen Colonies’ struggle for independence from Britain is well known to every American schoolchild. But at the start of the Revolutionary War, there were more than thirteen British colonies in North America. Patriots were surrounded by Indigenous homelands and loyal provinces. Independence had its limits. North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Jeffers Lennox focuses on Upper Canada, Lower Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and especially the homelands that straddled colonial borders. He argues that these areas were far less foreign to the men and women who established the United States than Canada is to those who live here now. These northern neighbors were far from inactive during the Revolution. The participation of the loyal British provinces and Indigenous nations that largely rejected the Revolution—as antagonists, opponents, or bystanders—shaped the progress of the conflict and influenced the American nation’s early development. In this book, historian Dr. Lennox looks north, as so many Americans at that time did, and describes how Loyalists and Indigenous leaders frustrated Patriot ambitions, defended their territory, and acted as midwives to the birth of the United States while restricting and redirecting its continental aspirations. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support resource extraction of fisheries off Labrador's coast.  In Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier (Duke UP, 2021), Rafico Ruiz engages with the Grenfell Mission to theorize how settler colonialism establishes itself through what he calls infrastructural mediation—the ways in which colonial lifeworlds, subjectivities, and affects come into being through the creation and maintenance of infrastructures. Drawing on archival documents, maps, interviews with municipal officials, teachers, and residents, as well as his field photography, Ruiz shows how the mission's infrastructural mediation—from its attempts to restructure the local economy to the aerial surveying and mapping of the coastline—responded to the colony's environmental conditions in ways that expanded the bounds of the settler frontier. By tracing the mission's history and the mechanisms that enabled its functioning, Ruiz complicates understandings of mediation and infrastructure while expanding current debates surrounding settler colonialism and extractive capitalism. Rafico Ruiz is the Associate Director of Research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He holds an ad personam PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture and Communication Studies from McGill University. He is the author of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier and the co-editor with Melody Jue of Saturation: An Elemental Politics. Padmapriya Vidhya-Govindarajan is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. Her research interests lie at the intersection of environmental justice, digital and film cultures, and community media-use practices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Greg Marchildon interviews Molly P. Rozum, the author of Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies (U of Nebraska P & U of Manitoba P, 2021). Molly Rozum is currently the Ronald R. Nelson Chair of Great Plains and South Dakota History at the University of South Dakota. She received her PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has worked on the history of this transnational region throughout her career. Although she grew up and was educated in the United States, she has spent time in Canada as a visiting professor and researcher. In this book, Rozum explores how the northern grasslands in North America were perceived by second and third generations of those who settled in the region to live, work, farm and ranch, including their relationship with the Indigenous peoples. This interview was produced with the support of The Champlain Society. The mission of The Champlain Society is to increase public awareness of, and accessibility to, Canada’s rich store of historical records. Gregory P. Marchildon is the Ontario Research Chair in Health Policy and System Design with the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

A year after John Bradstreet’s raid of 1758—the first and largest British-American riverine raid mounted during the Seven Years’ War (known in North America as the French and Indian War)—Benjamin Franklin hailed it as one of the great “American” victories of the war. Bradstreet heartily agreed, and soon enough, his own official account was adopted by Francis Parkman and other early historians. In John Bradstreet's Raid 1758: A Riverine Operation in the French and Indian War (U Oklahoma Press, 2022), Ian Macpherson McCulloch uses never-before-seen materials and a new interpretive approach to dispel many of the myths that have grown up around the operation. The result is a closely observed, deeply researched revisionist microhistory—the first unvarnished, balanced account of a critical moment in early American military history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Greg Marchildon interviews Benjamin Hoy, author of A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford UP, 2021). Hoy’s book is a history of the infrastructure, policies, and personnel that were put in place over the past three centuries to create a boundary between the United States and British North America and, subsequently, Canada after 1867. Hoy also examines the impact of this boundary on Indigenous peoples who lived on either side of this border, or on both sides simultaneously. A transnational historian and a dual citizen of both Canada and the United States, Benjamin Hoy is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan. This interview was produced with the support of The Champlain Society. The mission of The Champlain Society is to increase public awareness of, and accessibility to, Canada’s rich store of historical records. Gregory P. Marchildon is the Ontario Research Chair in Health Policy and System Design with the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Greg Marchildon interviews historian and ethnographer Jennifer Brown on her two most recent books. The first, Ojibwe Stories from the Upper Berens River: A Irving Hallowell and Adam Bigmouth in Conversation (U of Nebraska Press, 2018) concerns the interactions of American anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell with the Berens River band on the east side of Lake Winnipeg. The second book, An Ethnohistorian in Rupert’s Land: Unfinished Conversations (Athabasca UP, 2017), is a compilation of Professor Brown’s most influential articles– essays that have reshaped the historiography of Indigenous-settler relations and the role of women. From 1983 until 2008, Jennifer Brown was a professor as well as Director of the Centre for Rupert’s Land Studies at the University of Winnipeg. Since retirement, she has continued to research and write. This interview was produced with the support of The Champlain Society. The mission of The Champlain Society is to increase public awareness of, and accessibility to, Canada’s rich store of historical records. Gregory P. Marchildon is the Ontario Research Chair in Health Policy and System Design with the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

President Abraham Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution of Indigenous people in American history, following the 1862 uprising of hungry Dakota in Minnesota and suspiciously speedy trials. He also issued the largest commutation of executions in American history for the same act. But there is much more to the story of Lincoln’s interactions and involvement, personal and political, with Native Americans, as Michael S. Green shows. Lincoln and Native Americans (Southern Illinois UP, 2021) explains how Lincoln thought about Native Americans, interacted with them, and was affected by them. Although ignorant of Native customs, Lincoln revealed none of the hatred or single-minded opposition to Native culture that animated other leaders and some of his own political and military officials. Lincoln did far too little to ease the problems afflicting Indigenous people at the time, but he also expressed more sympathy for their situation than most other politicians of the day. Still, he was not what those who wanted legitimate improvements in the lives of Native Americans would have liked him to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Today I talked to Dr. Mohamed Adhikari about his book Destroying to Replace: Settler Genocides of Indigenous Peoples (Hackett, 2022). "This book explores settler colonial genocides in a global perspective and over the long durée. It does so systematically and compellingly, as it investigates how settler colonial expansion at times created conditions for genocidal violence, and the ways in which genocide was at times perpetrated on settler colonial frontiers. This volume will prove invaluable to teachers and students of imperialism, colonialism, and human rights." — Lorenzo Veracini, Swinburne University of Technology, and author of The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea "A succinct, insightful, and highly readable text discussing an issue that deserves to be integral to any world history course. Using four finely crafted, yet widely dispersed, case studies Adhikari strikingly shows how vulnerability and resistance occur as the waves of global capitalism hit indigenous societies." — Robert Gordon, University of Vermont “Illuminating and compelling. This is a volume about genocide, a recurrent phenomenon in world history that, disturbingly, has created our modernity. Mohamed Adhikari equips the reader with a sound conceptual introduction, then provides four detailed yet clear accounts of genocide in the Canary Islands, Queensland, California, and German Southwest Africa. He has expertly provided the big picture as well as the specifics true to each history. Primary sources from each episode invite the reader’s participation in analysis. A book with which to think and to teach others.” — Lora Wildenthal, Rice University This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

A violent ex-con forces his son to commit crimes in this unforgettable memoir about family and survival. Growing up on the Navajo Indian Reservation, David Crow and his three siblings idolized their dad, a self-taught Cherokee who loved to tell his children about his World War II feats. But as time passed, David discovered the other side of Thurston Crow, the ex-con with his own code of ethics that justified cruelty, violence, lies—even murder. Intimidating David with beatings, Thurston coerced his son into doing his criminal bidding. David’s mom, too mentally ill to care for her children, couldn’t protect him. Through sheer determination, David managed to get into college and achieve professional success. When he finally found the courage to refuse his father’s criminal demands, he unwittingly triggered a plot of revenge that would force him into a deadly showdown with Thurston Crow. David would have only twenty-four hours to outsmart his father—the brilliant, psychotic man who bragged that the three years he spent in the notorious San Quentin State Prison had been the easiest time of his life. Raw and palpable, The Pale-Faced Lie: A True Story (Sandra Jonas Publishing, 2019) is an inspirational story about the power of forgiveness and the strength of the human spirit. David Crow spent his early years on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico. Through grit, resilience, and a thirst for learning, he managed to escape his abusive childhood, graduate from college, and build a successful lobbying firm in Washington, DC. Today, David is a sought-after speaker, giving talks to various businesses and trade organizations around the world. Throughout the years, he has mentored over 200 college interns, performed pro bono service for the charitable organization Save the Children, and participated in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. An advocate for women, he donates a percentage of his royalties from The Pale-Faced Lie to Barrett House, a homeless shelter for women in Albuquerque. David and his wife, Patty, live in the suburbs of DC. Visit him at davidcrowauthor.com, on Facebook @authordavidcrow, on Twitter @author_crow, and on Instagram @dravidcrowauthor. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Many scholars assert that Mexico’s complex racial hierarchy, inherited from Spanish colonialism, became obsolete by the turn of the nineteenth century as class-based distinctions became more prominent and a largely mestizo population emerged. But the residues of the colonial caste system did not simply dissolve after Mexico gained independence. Rather, Ana Sabau argues, ever-present fears of racial uprising among elites and authorities led to persistent governmental techniques and ideologies designed to separate and control people based on their perceived racial status, as well as to the implementation of projects for development in fringe areas of the country.  Riot and Rebellion in Mexico: the Making of a Race War Paradigm (University of Texas Press, 2022) traces this race-based narrative through three historical flashpoints: the Bajío riots, the Haitian Revolution, and the Yucatan’s caste war. Sabau shows how rebellions were treated as racially motivated events rather than political acts and how the racialization of popular and indigenous sectors coincided with the construction of “whiteness” in Mexico. Drawing on diverse primary sources, Sabau demonstrates how the race war paradigm was mobilized in foreign and domestic affairs and reveals the foundations of a racial state and racially stratified society that persist today. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Expo 1967 was the centrepiece of Canada’s 100th birthday. Amid the crowds and the pageantry, one building stood out: The Indians of Canada Pavilion. This was more than a tall glass tipi. It revealed (at least partly) Canada's sordid colonial history, and it challenged the myth of Canada being a peace-loving and tolerant society. We tell the surprising story of the historical experts who put this thing together, and the public's reaction to their work This episode was produced in May 2020 as part of Darts and Letters predecessor, Cited. Polly Leger is the co-host alongside regular host and editor Gordon Katic. This was before the wave of discoveries of unmarked graves across Canada as horrific as the descriptions of residential schools are in this episode… the reality is worse, and we made this show before all that additional evidence had been discovered. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) led the Ecuadoran Citizens’ Revolution that claimed to challenge the tenets of neoliberalism and the legacies of colonialism. The Correa administration promised to advance Indigenous and Afro-descendant rights and redistribute resources to the most vulnerable. In many cases, these promises proved to be hollow. Using two decades of ethnographic research, Undoing Multiculturalism: Resource Extraction and Indigenous Rights in Ecuador (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) by Dr. Carmen Martínez Novo examines why these intentions did not become a reality, and how the Correa administration undermined the progress of Indigenous people. A main complication was pursuing independence from multilateral organizations in the context of skyrocketing commodity prices, which caused a new reliance on natural resource extraction. Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and other organized groups resisted the expansion of extractive industries into their territories because they threatened their livelihoods and safety. As the Citizens’ Revolution and other “Pink Tide” governments struggled to finance budgets and maintain power, they watered down subnational forms of self-government, slowed down land redistribution, weakened the politicized cultural identities that gave strength to social movements, and reversed other fundamental gains of the multicultural era. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

This is part 2 of a 2-part series from Cited - the predecessor of Darts and Letters. For the final episode of our “Activism & Academia”-themed week of programming, we’re returning to Cited’s series on genetically modified corn, Indigenous rights, and environmental law in Mexico. Return with us to our story on how the discovery of genetically modified corn in the Mexican highlands resulted in a revelatory battle over science, culture, trade and more. In this episode, we take you even further into the story. If you missed part 1 of this series, do go back to yesterday’s episode and give it a listen. And stay tuned for next week’s themed programming: we’re talking to you all about left opinion makers. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

This is part 1 of a 2-part series from Cited - the predecessor of Darts and Letters. When genetically modified corn was found in the highlands of Mexico, Indigenous campesino groups took to the streets to protect their cultural heritage, setting off a 20-year legal saga. The battle brought Indigenous rights, scientific methods, academic freedom, and law and trade into the mix. It’s a fascinating and eternally relevant story. You’ll hear from scientists, activists, farmers and more. In an era when food security, environmental protections, and Indigenous rights are as crucial and as fraught as ever before, this story is closer to home than you might think. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In many ways, Black Elk and John Neihardt lived very different lives. Black Elk was an Oglala Lakota holy man. Neihartd was a European-American literary critic. Black Elk performed for Queen Victoria with Buffalo Bills’s Wild West Show. Neihartd was Poet Laureate of Nebraska. But in other ways, they weren’t different at all. “By all accounts, they really, truly felt like they had a kind of spiritual affinity for one another,” says Harvard Professor Philip Deloria. In this episode, Professor Deloria discusses Black Elk Speaks, the book that Black Elk and Neihardt co-authored in 1932, which shaped the way both white and Native Americans understood Native culture. Philip Deloria is Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including Playing Indian and Indians in Unexpected Places. His most recent book is American Studies: A User's Guide, co-authored with Alexander Olson. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining much of their land in the Old Northwest—what’s now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and US development in the region. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates in Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America (Omohundro Institute/UNC Press, 2021), the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves. Outnumbering white settlers well into the nineteenth century, they leveraged their political savvy to advance a dual citizenship that enabled mixed-race tribal members to lay claim to a place in US civil society. Telling the stories of mixed-race traders and missionaries, tribal leaders and territorial governors, Witgen challenges our assumptions about the inevitability of US expansion. John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

M. K. Beauchamp's Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815 (LSU Press, 2021) examines the challenges that resulted from U.S. territorial expansion through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. With the acquisition of this vast region, the United States gained a colonial European population whose birthplace, language, and religion often differed from those of their U.S. counterparts. This population exhibited multiple ethnic tensions and possessed little experience with republican government. Consequently, administration of the territory proved a trial-and-error endeavor involving incremental cooperation between federal officials and local elites. As Beauchamp demonstrates, this process of gradual accommodation served as an essential nationalizing experience for the people of Louisiana. After the acquisition, federal officials who doubted the loyalty of the local French population and their capacity for self-governance denied the territory of Orleans--easily the region's most populated and economically robust area--a quick path to statehood. Instead, U.S. officials looked to groups including free people of color, Native Americans, and recent immigrants, all of whom found themselves ideally placed to negotiate for greater privileges from the new territorial government. Beauchamp argues that U.S. administrators, despite claims of impartiality and equality before the law, regularly acted as fickle agents of imperial power and frequently co-opted local elites with prominent positions within the parishes. Overall, the methods utilized by the United States in governing Louisiana shared much in common with European colonial practices implemented elsewhere in North America during the early nineteenth century. While historians have previously focused on Washington policy makers in investigating the relationship between the United States and the newly acquired territory, Beauchamp emphasizes the integral role played by territorial elites who wielded enormous power and enabled government to function. His work offers profound insights into the interplay of class, ethnicity, and race, as well as an understanding of colonialism, the nature of republics, democracy, and empire. By placing the territorial period of early national Louisiana in an imperial context, this study reshapes perceptions of American expansion and manifest destiny in the nineteenth century and beyond. Instruments of Empire serves as a rich resource for specialists studying Louisiana and the U.S. South, as well as scholars of slavery and free people of color, nineteenth-century American history, Atlantic World and border studies, U.S. foreign relations, and the history of colonialism and empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The term cacica was a Spanish linguistic invention, the female counterpart to caciques, the Arawak word for male indigenous leaders in Spanish America. But the term’s meaning was adapted and manipulated by natives, creating a new social stratum where it previously may not have existed. This book explores that transformation, a conscious construction and reshaping of identity from within. Cacicas feature far and wide in the history of Spanish America, as female governors and tribute collectors and as relatives of ruling caciques—or their destitute widows. They played a crucial role in the establishment and success of Spanish rule, but were also instrumental in colonial natives’ resistance and self-definition. Margarita R. Ochoa and Sara V. Guengerich's edited book Cacicas: The Indigenous Women Leaders of Spanish America, 1492-1825 (U Oklahoma Press, 2021), noted scholars uncover the history of colonial cacicas, moving beyond anecdotes of individuals in Spanish America. Their work focuses on the evolution of indigenous leadership, particularly the lineage and succession of these positions in different regions, through the lens of native women’s political activism. Such activism might mean the intervention of cacicas in the economic, familial, and religious realms or their participation in official and unofficial matters of governance. The authors explore the role of such personal authority and political influence across a broad geographic, chronological, and thematic range—in patterns of succession, the settling of frontier regions, interethnic relations and the importance of purity of blood, gender and family dynamics, legal and marital strategies for defending communities, and the continuation of indigenous governance. This volume showcases colonial cacicas as historical subjects who constructed their consciousness around their place, whether symbolic or geographic, and articulated their own unique identities. It expands our understanding of the significant influence these women exerted—within but also well beyond the native communities of Spanish America. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Understanding and explaining societal rules surrounding food and foodways have been the foci of anthropological studies since the early days of the discipline. Baking, Bourbon, and Black Drink: Foodways Archaeology in the American Southeast (U Alabama Press, 2018), however, is the first collection devoted exclusively to southeastern foodways analyzed through archaeological perspectives. These essays examine which foods were eaten and move the discussion of foodstuffs into the sociocultural realm of why, how, and when they were eaten. Editors Tanya M. Peres and Aaron Deter-Wolf present a volume that moves beyond basic understandings, applying new methods or focusing on subjects not widely discussed in the Southeast to date. Chapters are arranged using the dominant research themes of feasting, social and political status, food security and persistent places, and foodways histories. Contributors provide in-depth examination of specific food topics such as bone marrow, turkey, Black Drink, bourbon, earth ovens, and hominy. Contributors bring a broad range of expertise to the collection, resulting in an expansive look at all of the steps taken from field to table, including procurement, production, cooking, and consumption, all of which have embedded cultural meanings and traditions. The scope of the volume includes the diversity of research specialties brought to bear on the topic of foodways as well as the temporal and regional breadth and depth, the integration of multiple lines of evidence, and, in some cases, the reinvestigation of well-known sites with new questions and new data. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community (U Washington Press, 2022) explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity. With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people who have been negated and written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Conversations with LeAnne Howe (UP of Mississippi, 2022) is the first collection of interviews with the groundbreaking Choctaw author, whose genre-bending works take place in the US Southeast, Oklahoma, and beyond our national borders to bring Native American characters and themes to the global stage. Best known for her American Book Award-winning novel Shell Shaker (2001), LeAnne Howe (b. 1951) is also a poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, theorist, and humorist. She has held numerous honors including a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship in Amman, Jordan, from 2010 to 2011, and she was the recipient of the Modern Language Association's first Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages for her travelogue, Choctalking on Other Realities (2013). Spanning the period from 2002 to 2020, the interviews in this collection delve deeply into Howe's poetics, her innovative critical methodology of tribalography, her personal history, and her position on subjects ranging from the Lone Ranger to Native American mascots. Two previously unpublished interviews, "'An American in New York' LeAnne Howe" (2019) and "Genre-Sliding on Stage with LeAnne Howe" (2020), explore unexamined areas of her personal history and how it impacted her creative work, including childhood trauma and her incubation as a playwright in the 1980s. These conversations along with 2019's Occult Poetry Radio interview also give important insights on the background of Howe's newest critically acclaimed work, Savage Conversations (2019), about Mary Todd Lincoln's hallucination of a "Savage Indian" during her time in Bellevue Place sanitarium. Taken as a whole, Conversations with LeAnne Howe showcases the development and continued impact of one of the most important Indigenous American writers of the twenty-first century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

To many Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the West was simultaneously the greatest symbol of American opportunity, the greatest story of its history, and the imagined blank slate on which the country's future would be written. From the Spanish-American War in 1898 to the Great Depression's end, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, policymakers at various levels and large-scale corporate investors, along with those living in the West and its borderlands, struggled over who would define modernity, who would participate in the modern American West, and who would be excluded. In Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898-1940 (U Nebraska Press, 2022)Sarah Deutsch surveys the history of the U.S. West from 1898 to 1940. Centering what is often relegated to the margins in histories of the region--the flows of people, capital, and ideas across borders--Deutsch attends to the region's role in constructing U.S. racial formations and argues that the West as a region was as important as the South in constructing the United States as a "white man's country." While this racial formation was linked to claims of modernity and progress by powerful players, Deutsch shows that visions of what constituted modernity were deeply contested by others. This expansive volume presents the most thorough examination to date of the American West from the late 1890s to the eve of World War II. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

For centuries Comanches have captivated imaginations. Yet their story in popular accounts abruptly stops in 1875, when the last free Comanches entered a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma. In Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands (U Nebraska Press, 2022), the first tribal-specific history of Comanches in film and media, Quanah Parker descendant Dustin Tahmahkera examines how Comanches represent themselves and are represented by others in recent media. Telling a story of Comanche family and extended kin and their relations to film, Tahmahkera reframes a distorted and defeated history of Comanches into a vibrant story of cinematic traditions, agency, and cultural continuity. Co-starring a long list of Comanche actors, filmmakers, consultants, critics, and subjects, Cinematic Comanches moves through the politics of tribal representation and history to highlight the production of Comanchería cinema. From early silent films and 1950s Westerns to Disney’s The Lone Ranger and the story of how Comanches captured its controversial Comanche lead Johnny Depp, Tahmahkera argues that Comanche nationhood can be strengthened through cinema. Tahmahkera’s extensive research includes interviews with elder LaDonna Harris, who adopted Depp during filming in one of the most contested films in recent Indigenous cinematic history. In the fragmented popular narrative of the rise and fall of Comanches, Cinematic Comanches calls for considering mediated contributions to the cultural resurgence of Comanches today. Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez an associate professor of History at Texas State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement (Between the Lines Books, 2020) details the life of George Manuel, a seminal figure in the emergence and development of the modern Indigenous rights movement in Canada. A three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, he laid the groundwork for what would become the Assembly of First Nations and was the founding president of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples; an advocacy organization that fights for the rights of Indigenous peoples internationally. A critical reference point for three generation of Indigenous activists and intellectuals, Manuel’s commitment, politics, and vision are now again assessable to a new generation of readers courtesy of Doreen and Peter, and Between the Lines Books in Toronto. Zachary Smith (Anishinaabe) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. He researches histories of Indigenous-settler relations in Canada and is currently writing a dissertation on the migration of Indigenous peoples from reserves to urban centres in mid-twentieth century Canada. He can be found on Twitter at: @zacharylwsmith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The important new book by Alicia Puglionesi, In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession and the Landscapes of American Empire (Scribner, 2022), is a fat sampler of episodes that show how origin stories get made, what happens when white-supremacist origin stories are mistaken for empirical fact, and how the political impacts persist. The book is decidedly anti-capitalist; resoundingly anti-colonial. It is an invitation not to jettison story-work, but to imagine, collectively, origin stories of the present that might bring into being a more just future. In Whose Ruins could easily be categorized as Environmental History or Native Studies. But Puglionesi forges a book that is more than either field could accomplish alone. The “power” of the book’s subtitle has a double meeting: political power and the energy sources of a capitalist economy (oil, hydropower, and nuclear energy). The book is organized into four sections, or “sites,” that visit four evocative land features: a hulking, conical earth mound in present-day West Virginia adjacent to a decommissioned state prison; wells dug into the ground in smalltown Pennsylvania; rocks that tell stories (they’re etched with petroglyphs) along the Susquehanna River with kin fragmented elsewhere; the Sonoran Desert rich with pottery, uranium, and physicists, both white and Native. In each of these sites, people with different political projects—some announced, some implicit—have generated multiple accounts of the landscapes and ideas of value. Within a context of shifting political power, white-settler stories about each site displaced empirical knowledge of Native labor, skill, presence, and endurance with harmful fables of white origins and of Native communities’ need for white “rescue.” Into the present day, the effect has been to justify white theft of Native land and deadly violence against tribal communities for the purposes of resource extraction. In the end, even the false white origin stories became a resource to commodify. Puglionesi is a writer of poetry, fiction, academic scholarship, and, now, In Whose Ruins, a mass-market trade publication. She holds a PhD in History of Medicine and is a lecturer in Medicine, Science and Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. On the page, Puglionesi has a friendly, funny, quiet presence—an affable Where’s Waldo that centers the relationships of historical actors (including spirits) and the work of scholars such as Kim TallBear, Zoe Todd, and Eve Tuck. This conversation explores ways of living in good relation via writing; the status of truth; the relevance of singer-songwriter Prince for labor studies; and many other themes. It discusses the important book by Chadwick Allen, Earthworks Rising (Minnesota, 2022). In an unrecorded snippet, we also swap names of our favorite local indie bookstores. So check out Red Emma’s the next time you’re in Baltimore, MD (or on Bookshop.org) and Symposium, Riff Raff, and Paper Nautilus when your compass points to Providence, RI. Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Affect, Ecofeminism, and Intersectional Struggles in Latin America: A Tribute to Berta Cáceres (Peter Lang, 2020), Irune del Rio Gabiola examines the power of affect in structuring decolonizing modes of resistance performed by social movements such as COPINH (Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras). Despite a harsh legacy of colonialism, indigenous communities continue suffering from territorial displacements, dispossession, and human rights abuses due to extractivist projects that are violently destroying their land and, therefore, the environment. In particular, the Lenca communities in Honduras have been negatively affected by Western ideas of progress and development that have historically eliminated ancestral knowledges and indigenous ecological cosmologies while reinforcing Eurocentrism. Nevertheless, by reflecting on and articulating strategies for resisting neoliberalism, COPINH and its cofounder Berta Cáceres' commitment to environmental activism, ecofeminism, and intersectional struggles has contributed affectively and effectively to the production of democratic encounters in pursuit of social justice. In homage to Berta, who was brutally assassinated for her activism in 2016, this book takes the reader on an affective journey departing from the violent affects experienced by the Lencas due to colonial disruption, contemporary industrialization, and criminalization, towards COPINH's political and social intervention fueled by outrage, resistance, transnational solidarity, care, mourning, and hope. In this way, subaltern actors nurture the power to--in line with Brian Massumi's interpretation of affect--transform necropolitics into natality with the aim of creating a fairer and better world The host, Elize Mazadiego, is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and author of Dematerialization and the Social Materiality of Art: Experimental Forms in Argentina, 1955-1968 (Brill, 2021). She works on Modern and Contemporary art, with a specialization in Latin American art history.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

No matter what people call them today the northwestern Great Plains have been and continue to be Blackfoot country, argues Colgate University assistant professor Ryan Hall in Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720-1877 (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). By maintaining their boundaries and enforcing power between both European empires and Indigenous neighbors, the Blackfoot were able to carve out a lasting niche in the contested borderlands of the early North American West of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although disease, resource depletion, and colonization would eventually be visited upon the Blackfoot, along with American settler colonialism, this outcome was never preordained. Nor was that the entire story, as Blackfoot history carries on well after such well known events as the Montana gold rush and the Marias Massacre. Beneath the Backbone of the World is an example of Native history's power to force a rethinking of North American history's arc. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology (Harvard UP, 2021) is a searching account of nineteenth-century salvage anthropology, an effort to preserve the culture of “vanishing” Indigenous peoples through dispossession of the very communities it was meant to protect. In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other chroniclers began amassing Indigenous cultural objects—crafts, clothing, images, song recordings—by the millions. Convinced that Indigenous peoples were doomed to disappear, collectors donated these objects to museums and universities that would preserve and exhibit them. Samuel Redman dives into the archive to understand what the collectors deemed the tradition of the “vanishing Indian” and what we can learn from the complex legacy of salvage anthropology. The salvage catalog betrays a vision of Native cultures clouded by racist assumptions—a vision that had lasting consequences. The collecting practice became an engine of the American museum and significantly shaped public education and preservation, as well as popular ideas about Indigenous cultures. Prophets and Ghosts teases out the moral challenges inherent in the salvage project. Preservationists successfully maintained an important human inheritance, sometimes through collaboration with Indigenous people, but collectors’ methods also included outright theft. The resulting portrait of Indigenous culture reinforced the public’s confidence in the hierarchies of superiority and inferiority invented by “scientific” racism. Today the same salvaged objects are sources of invaluable knowledge for researchers and museum visitors. But the question of what should be done with such collections is nonetheless urgent. Redman interviews Indigenous artists and curators, who offer fresh perspectives on the history and impact of cultural salvage, pointing to new ideas on how we might contend with a challenging inheritance. Alex Golub is associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Paul Conrad brings to life the stories of displaced Apaches and the kin from whom they were separated. Conrad uses the lens of “diaspora” to analyze four centuries of Ndé/Apache history, from their initial interactions with Europeans in the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century, when several dozen Apaches returned to the Southwest –if not to their ancestral lands, after decades of forced exile. The case for an Apache diaspora is persuasively demonstrated throughout with illustrative examples drawn from a wide array of secondary and primary sources, including original documents from repositories in the U.S., Mexico, and Spain. Conrad charts Apaches' efforts to survive or return home from places as far-flung as Cuba and Pennsylvania, Mexico City and Montreal. While deeply analytical, Conrad enlivens his narrative with meaningful stories, such as the arrival of the first shipment of Apaches to Havana in 1784, and evocative vignettes, for instance, of life on the reservations in the 1870s. Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez es profesor de Historia en Texas State University. Sus intereses académicos incluyen la etnohistoria, los pueblos indígenas de las Grandes Llanuras y el Suroeste de EE.UU., la frontera México-EE.UU. y la América hispánica. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In May 1776 more than two hundred Indian warriors descended the St. Lawrence River to attack Continental forces at the Cedars, west of Montreal. In just three days’ fighting, the Native Americans and their British and Canadian allies forced the American fort to surrender and ambushed a fatally delayed relief column. In Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution (University of Oklahoma Press, 2022), Mark R. Anderson flips the usual perspective on this early engagement and focuses on its Native participants—their motivations, battlefield conduct, and the event’s impact in their world. In this way, Anderson’s work establishes and explains Native Americans’ centrality in the Revolutionary War’s northern theater. Anderson’s dramatic, deftly written narrative encompasses decisive diplomatic encounters, political intrigue, and scenes of brutal violence but is rooted in deep archival research and ethnohistorical scholarship. It sheds new light on the alleged massacre and atrocities that other accounts typically focus on. At the same time, Anderson traces the aftermath for Indian captives and military hostages, as well as the political impact of the Cedars reaching all the way to the Declaration of Independence. The action at the Cedars emerges here as a watershed moment, when Indian neutrality frayed to the point that hundreds of northern warriors entered the fight between crown and colonies. Adroitly interweaving the stories of diverse characters—chiefs, officials, agents, soldiers, and warriors—Down the Warpath to the Cedars produces a complex picture, and a definitive account, of the Revolutionary War’s first Indian battles, an account that significantly expands our historical understanding of the northern theater of the American Revolution. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The 1980s and '90s saw Latin American governments recognizing the property rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities as part of a broader territorial policy shift. But the resulting reforms were not applied consistently, more often extending neoliberal governance than recognizing Indigenous Peoples' rights. In Negotiating Autonomy: Mapuche Territorial Demands and Chilean Land Policy (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021), Kelly Bauer explores the inconsistencies by which the Chilean government transfers land in response to Mapuche territorial demands. Interviews with community and government leaders, statistical analysis of an original dataset of Mapuche mobilization and land transfers, and analysis of policy documents reveals that many assumptions about post-dictatorship Chilean politics as technocratic and depoliticized do not apply to Indigenous policy. Rather, state officials often work to preserve the hegemony of political and economic elites in the region, effectively protecting existing market interests over efforts to extend the neoliberal project to the governance of Mapuche territorial demands. In addition to complicating understandings of Chilean governance, these hidden patterns of policy implementation reveal the numerous ways these governance strategies threaten the recognition of Indigenous rights and create limited space for communities to negotiate autonomy. Kelly Bauer is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Nebraska Wesleyan University, and member of the Red De Politólogas – #NoSinMujeres. Her research and teaching examine state policy and rhetoric about Indigenous rights, irregular migration, and human security regimes in South America. She also researches pedagogy and knowledge production in political science classrooms, and migration politics and rhetoric in Nebraska. Her work has been externally funded by the U.S. Fulbright Program, Inter-American Foundation’s Grassroots Development Fellowship, and APSA Centennial Center. Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Often overlooked, there is mixed blood at the heart of America. And at the heart of Native life for centuries there were complex households using intermarriage to link disparate communities and create protective circles of kin. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Native peoples—Ojibwes, Otoes, Cheyennes, Chinooks, and others—formed new families with young French, English, Canadian, and American fur traders who spent months in smoky winter lodges or at boisterous summer rendezvous. These families built cosmopolitan trade centers from Michilimackinac on the Great Lakes to Bellevue on the Missouri River, Bent’s Fort in the southern Plains, and Fort Vancouver in the Pacific Northwest. Their family names are often imprinted on the landscape, but their voices have long been muted in our histories. Anne F. Hyde’s pathbreaking history restores them in full. Vividly combining the panoramic and the particular, Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West (Norton, 2022) follows five mixed-descent families whose lives intertwined major events: imperial battles over the fur trade; the first extensions of American authority west of the Appalachians; the ravages of imported disease; the violence of Indian removal; encroaching American settlement; and, following the Civil War, the disasters of Indian war, reservations policy, and allotment. During the pivotal nineteenth century, mixed-descent people who had once occupied a middle ground became a racial problem drawing hostility from all sides. Their identities were challenged by the pseudo-science of blood quantum—the instrument of allotment policy—and their traditions by the Indian schools established to erase Native ways. As Anne F. Hyde shows, they navigated the hard choices they faced as they had for centuries: by relying on the rich resources of family and kin. Here is an indelible western history with a new human face. Andrew R. Graybill is professor of history and Director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, where he has taught since 2011. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay (U New Mexico Press, 2020), historian Shawn Michael Austin traces the history of conquest and colonization in Paraguay during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Emphasizing the social and cultural agency of Guaraní--one of the primary indigenous peoples of Paraguay--not only in Jesuit missions but also in colonial settlements and Indian pueblos scattered in and around the Spanish city of Asunción, Austin argues that interethnic relations and cultural change in Paraguay can only be properly understood through the Guaraní logic of kinship. In the colonial backwater of Paraguay, conquistadors were forced to marry into Guaraní families in order to acquire indigenous tributaries, thereby becoming brothers-in-law (tovajá) to Guaraní chieftains. This pattern of interethnic exchange infused colonial relations and institutions with Guaraní social meanings and expectations of reciprocity that forever changed Spaniards, African slaves, and their descendants. Austin demonstrates that Guaraní of diverse social and political positions actively shaped colonial society along indigenous lines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Hawai'i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Duke UP, 2021) maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged anti-Black racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one-drop rule, non-White multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawaiʻi their haven, describing it as a place to "breathe" that offers the possibility of becoming local. Sharma's analysis of race, indigeneity, and Asian settler colonialism shifts North American debates in Black and Native studies to the Black Pacific. Hawaiʻi Is My Haven illustrates what the Pacific offers members of the African diaspora and how they in turn illuminate race and racism in "paradise." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Herring are vital to the productivity and health of marine systems, and socio-ecologically Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) is one of the most important fish species in the Northern Hemisphere. Human dependence on herring has evolved for millennia through interactions with key spawning areas, but humans have also significantly impacted the species’ distribution and abundance. Combining ethnological, historical, archaeological, and political perspectives with comparative reference to other North Pacific cultures, Herring and People of the North Pacific: Sustaining a Keystone Species (U Washington Press, 2021) traces fishery development in Southeast Alaska from precontact Indigenous relationships with herring to postcontact focus on herring products. Revealing new findings about current herring stocks as well as the fish’s significance to the conservation of intraspecies biodiversity, the book explores the role of traditional local knowledge, in combination with archeological, historical, and biological data, in both understanding marine ecology and restoring herring to their former abundance. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Tessa Murphy traces how generations of Indigenous Kalinagos, free and enslaved Africans, and settlers from a variety of European nations used maritime routes to forge social, economic, and informal political connections that spanned the eastern Caribbean. Focusing on a chain of volcanic islands, each one visible from the next, whose societies developed outside the sphere of European rule until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Murphy argues that the imperial frameworks typically used to analyze the early colonial Caribbean are at odds with the geographic realities that shaped daily life in the region. Through use of wide-ranging sources including historical maps, parish records, an Indigenous-language dictionary, and colonial correspondence housed in the Caribbean, France, England, and the United States, Murphy shows how this watery borderland became a center of broader imperial experimentation, contestation, and reform. British and French officials dispatched to Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Tobago after 1763 encountered a creolized society that repeatedly frustrated their attempts to transform the islands into productive plantation colonies. By centering the stories of Kalinagos who asserted continued claims to land, French Catholics who demanded the privileges of British subjects, and free people of African descent who insisted on their right to own land and enslaved people, Murphy offers a vivid counterpoint to larger Caribbean plantation societies like Jamaica and Barbados. By looking outward from the eastern Caribbean chain, The Creole Archipelago resituates small islands as microcosms of broader historical processes central to understanding early American and Atlantic history, including European usurpation of Indigenous lands, the rise of slavery and plantation production, and the creation and codification of racial difference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Josefa Velasquez lived a long and full life. When Josefa wasn't co-running a tamale factory and cantina just outside of Wastonville, she was hosting friends and family at her saloon, where "drinking, dancing, and eating tomales" abounded. Josefa's friend, Maria Ascenciόn Solόrsano, was surprised she lived so long: "this woman lived like a rich woman, she ate of the best and drank of the best, and in spite of that she lasted long." "Surely," deduced Maria, Josefa "must have taken after her ancestors." Josefa Velasquez "had no fear of anything," another testament to her ancestors. Josefa had been born in a mission, and she outlived the institution that silenced generations of Indigenous peoples across California starting in the late eighteenth century. Josefa "lasted long," and so have her descendants, who today make up the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. Read a conventional history of the California missions, and you may not meet the lively Josefa Velasquez, hear the voice of her friend Maria Ascenciόn Solόrsano, or know that their descendants still live in the Santa Cruz region today. But when Indigenous voices are placed at the center of California history, they create a remarkable collective testimony to Indigenous survival. This is what makes We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) such a powerful book. With creative use of mission archives and oral history, author Martin Rizzo-Martinez shows how Indigenous peoples in the Santa Cruz region resisted waves of colonization throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This politics of rebellion took many forms, ranging from mass mobilization against missions themselves (like the 1793 Quiroste-led rebellion against Mission Santa Cruz) to unflinching assertions of Indigenous identity (such as Macedonia Lorenzo's 1851 testimony who, after stating "himself an Indian," was deemed an "incompetent" witness in American courts). Against increasingly considerable odds, Indigenous peoples repeatedly rejected various efforts of erasure, in turn revealing them as colonialism's great failure. An homage to Indigenous peoples' long struggle against colonization in California, We Are Not Animals narrates a critical history of how Indigenous families fought for their futures. Author Martin Rizzo-Martinez is the state park historian of California State Park's Santa Cruz District. Dr. Rizzo-Martinez is currently producing a podcast, Challenging Colonialism, that brings Indigenous voices back to the center of California history. He is also working on a documentary project about the 2015 Walk for the Ancestors pilgrimage in honor of Indigenous ancestors who suffered and perished in the Mission system. Listeners can purchase We Are Not Animals from the University of Nebraska Press for 40% off using discount code: 6AS21. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Larissa Fasthorse's new collection of plays includes the wildly successful plays The Thanksgiving Play/What Would Crazy Horse Do? (Theatre Communications Group, 2021). In both plays, Fasthorse explores issues facing contemporary Native Americans, but also white America's complicated self-identity in an era of multiculturalism. In The Thanksgiving Play, four white people with varying degrees of theatre experience try to stage a historically sensitive Thanksgiving pageant for a local school, with predictably disastrous results. What Would Crazy Horse Do? features the last two members of a fictional tribe who are forced to confront uncomfortable aspects of their own history when they learn that their grandfather participated in a reenactment of a powwow as part of a Klan rally. This gut-churning play reveals the fallacy of any ideology of racial purity, whether involving whites, indigenous peoples, or any other group. Together, these two plays are a riotously funny but ultimately unsettling look at contemporary politics of race and representation. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

John and new Brandeis host Jerome Tharaud (author of Apocalyptic Geographies) learn exactly how the growth of America's public universities relied on shameful seizures of Native American land. Working with Tristan Athone --editor of Grist and a member of the Kiowa Tribe--historian Robert Lee wrote a stunning series of pieces that reveal how many public land-grant universities were fundamentally financed and sustained by a long-lasting settle-colonial "land grab." Their meticulous work paints an unusually detailed picture of how most highly praised institutions of higher education in America (Cornell, MIT, UC Berkeley and virtually all of the great Midwestern public universities) were initially launched and sometimes later sustained by a flood of cash deriving directly or indirectly from that stolen and seized land. Jerome and John discuss with Lee issues that are covered in the initial article in High Country News, a dedicated website with a better version of this fantastic map, a follow-up article tracing land that was never sold, and a scholarly forum that followed from their findings. The Morrill Act (1862, right in the middle of the Civil War, and that is no coincidence). Its author Justin Morrill, a Vermont Senator, argued the land-grants were a payback for the East's investment in opening the West. The West was "a plundered province" wrote Bernard de Voto (Harpers, August 1934). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

From historian and critically acclaimed author of The Three-Cornered War comes the propulsive and vividly told story of how Yellowstone became the world’s first national park amid the nationwide turmoil and racial violence of the Reconstruction era. Each year nearly four million people visit Yellowstone National Park—one of the most popular of all national parks—but few know the fascinating and complex historical context in which it was established. In late July 1871, the geologist-explorer Ferdinand Hayden led a team of scientists through a narrow canyon into Yellowstone Basin, entering one of the last unmapped places in the country. The survey’s discoveries led to the passage of the Yellowstone Act in 1872, which created the first national park in the world. Now, author Megan Kate Nelson examines the larger context of this American moment, illuminating Hayden’s survey as a national project meant to give Americans a sense of achievement and unity in the wake of a destructive civil war. Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner, 2022) follows Hayden and two other protagonists in pursuit of their own agendas: Sitting Bull, a Lakota leader who asserted his peoples’ claim to their homelands, and financier Jay Cooke, who wanted to secure his national reputation by building the Northern Pacific Railroad through the Great Northwest. Hayden, Cooke, and Sitting Bull staked their claims to Yellowstone at a critical moment in Reconstruction, when the Grant Administration and the 42nd Congress were testing the reach and the purpose of federal power across the nation. A narrative of adventure and exploration, Saving Yellowstone is also a story of Indigenous resistance, the expansive reach of railroad, photographic, and publishing technologies, and the struggles of Black southerners to bring racial terrorists to justice. It reveals how the early 1870s were a turning point in the nation’s history, as white Americans ultimately abandoned the higher ideal of equality for all people, creating a much more fragile and divided United States. Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian living in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She has written about the Civil War, US western history, and American culture for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, Preservation Magazine, and Civil War Monitor. Nelson earned her BA in history and literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American studies from the University of Iowa, and she has taught at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. Nelson is the author of Saving Yellowstone, The Three-Cornered War, Ruin Nation, and Trembling Earth. Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Stephanie Khattak speaks with Dr. Linda Legarde Grover, an award-winning author whose latest book interweaves family and Ojibwe history with stories from Misaabekong (the place of the giants) on Lake Superior in Duluth, Minnesota: Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong (U Minnesota Press, 2021) Dr. Grover is an Anishinaabe novelist and short story writer. She is a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth and a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe. Her work, which spans fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, recounts stories of Ojibwe life in northeastern Minnesota individuals, families and communities set against the backdrop of indigenous tradition and impacts of historical and current events. In this interview, Dr. Grover shares the importance of stories and folklore traditions; her perspective as a scholar and storyteller, and the intrinsic value of maintaining - and strengthening - connections with people, places and communities beyond ourselves. Stephanie Khattak is a writer, artist, historian and folklore enthusiast. Visit stephaniekhattak.com to learn more, and connect on Twitter: @steph_khattak, Facebook: @khattakstudios or Instagram: @pinecurtainproject. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Kyle T. Mays, an Afro-Indigenous historian, argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in anti-blackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present.  In An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2021), he explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled for freedom, sometimes together, and sometimes apart. Whether to end African enslavement and Indigenous removal or eradicate capitalism and colonialism, Mays shows how Black and Indigenous peoples’ calls for justice have consistently sought to uproot white supremacy. Using a wide array of key texts and pop culture touchstones, Mays also covers the civil rights movement and freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and explores current debates around the use of Native American imagery and the appropriation of Black culture. John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas (NYU Press, 2021) tells the story of the founding of American Christianity against the backdrop of devastating disease, and of the Indigenous survivors who kept the nascent faith alive Many scholars have come to think of the European Christian mission to the Americas as an inevitable success. But in its early period it was very much on the brink of failure. In 1576, Indigenous Mexican communities suffered a catastrophic epidemic that took almost two million lives and simultaneously left the colonial church in ruins. In the crisis and its immediate aftermath, Spanish missionaries and surviving pueblos de indios held radically different visions for the future of Christianity in the Americas. The Church of the Dead offers a counter-history of American Christian origins. It centers the power of Indigenous Mexicans, showing how their Catholic faith remained intact even in the face of the faltering religious fervor of Spanish missionaries. While the Europeans grappled with their failure to stem the tide of death, succumbing to despair, Indigenous survivors worked to reconstruct the church. They reasserted ancestral territories as sovereign, with Indigenous Catholic states rivaling the jurisdiction of the diocese and the power of friars and bishops. Christianity in the Americas today is thus not the creation of missionaries, but rather of Indigenous Catholic survivors of the colonial mortandad, the founding condition of American Christianity. Weaving together archival study, visual culture, church history, theology, and the history of medicine, Jennifer Scheper Hughes provides us with a fascinating reexamination of North American religious history that is at once groundbreaking and lyrical. Brady McCartney is a Ph.D. student and scholar of religion, Indigenous studies, and environmental history at the University of Florida.Email: Brady.McCartney@UFL.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere (U Nebraska Press, 2021) is a reclaimed history of the deep past of Indigenous people in North and South America during the Paleolithic. Paulette F. C. Steeves mines evidence from archaeology sites and Paleolithic environments, landscapes, and mammalian and human migrations to make the case that people have been in the Western Hemisphere not only just prior to Clovis sites (10,200 years ago) but for more than 60,000 years, and likely more than 100,000 years. Steeves discusses the political history of American anthropology to focus on why pre-Clovis sites have been dismissed by the field for nearly a century. She explores supporting evidence from genetics and linguistic anthropology regarding First Peoples and time frames of early migrations. Additionally, she highlights the work and struggles faced by a small yet vibrant group of American and European archaeologists who have excavated and reported on numerous pre-Clovis archaeology sites. In this first book on Paleolithic archaeology of the Americas written from an Indigenous perspective, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere includes Indigenous oral traditions, archaeological evidence, and a critical and decolonizing discussion of the development of archaeology in the Americas. To learn more about Steeves’ research, please visit The Indigenous Paleolithic Database of the Americas at https://tipdba.com/. This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people—the tribe had owned enslaved Blacks since the 1720s. By the eve of the Civil War, 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation consisted of enslaved Blacks. Avid supporters of the Confederate States of America, the Nation passed a measure requiring all whites living in its territory to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and deemed any criticism of it or its army treasonous and punishable by death. Choctaws also raised an infantry force and a cavalry to fight alongside Confederate forces. In Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country (UNC Press, 2021), Fay A. Yarbrough reveals that, while sovereignty and states’ rights mattered to Choctaw leaders, the survival of slavery also determined the Nation’s support of the Confederacy. Mining service records for approximately 3,000 members of the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles, Yarbrough examines the experiences of Choctaw soldiers and notes that although their enthusiasm waned as the war persisted, military service allowed them to embrace traditional masculine roles that were disappearing in a changing political and economic landscape. By drawing parallels between the Choctaw Nation and the Confederate states, Yarbrough looks beyond the traditional binary of the Union and Confederacy and reconsiders the historical relationship between Native populations and slavery. Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 202) Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Mary Sully was many things: a Dakota woman, an artist, and an American living through a heyday of early celebrity culture in the United States. All of these facets of her life and of her context are present in her art. In Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (University of Washington Press, 2019), Harvard University professor and OAH President (and direct Sully relative) Phil Deloria uncovers Sully's artwork, long tucked away in family attics, and explains why it matters. Deloria argues that Sully's abstract "personality prints" representing various American celebrities of the early 20th century placed her outside the mainstream of the often "primitivist" Native art world of the era. Instead, Sully planted one foot firmly in modernism, while keeping the other rooted in Native art traditions, making her impossible to classify as one thing or another. Deloria tells a remarkably personal and beautiful story of an unheralded master of visual arts gazing into a new American and American Indian future and representing what she sees in vibrant color and intricate patterns, defying easy categorization and expectation. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Samantha Seeley is the author of Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2021. Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain explores the how, at various levels of government and among a variety of people the right to remain and who would be subject to removal was debated. Seeley’s study illustrates how Native Americans and African Americans had to navigate a myriad of challenges to their place both within and outside of the nation. This work reorients the history of U.S. expansion and reconsiders how the early United States was built around the movement and non-movement of people. Dr. Seeley is an Assistant Professor at the University of Richmond. Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park. His dissertation, "The Specter of Black Citizens: Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Early United States," examines how citizenship was used to both bolster the institution of slavery and exclude Black Americans from the body politic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Originally published in 2006, Art of the Northwest Coast offers an expansive history of this great tradition, from the earliest known works to those made at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although non-Natives often claimed that First Nations cultures were disappearing, Northwest Coast Native people continued to make art during the painful era of colonization, often subtly expressing resistance to their oppressors and demonstrating the resilience of their heritage. Integrating the art’s development with historical events following contact with Euro-Americans sheds light on the creativity of artists as they appropriated and transformed foreign elements into uniquely Indigenous statements. A new chapter discusses contemporary artists, including Marianne Nicholson, Nicholas Galanin, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, and Sonny Assu, who address pressing issues ranging from Indigenous sovereignty and destruction of the environment to the power of Native women and efforts to work with non-Natives to heal the wounds of racism and discrimination. Kirstin L. Ellsworth holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Indiana University and is Associate Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hills. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Kevin Bruyneel confronts the chronic displacement of Indigeneity in the politics and discourse around race in American political theory and culture, arguing that the ongoing influence of settler-colonialism has undermined efforts to understand Indigenous politics while also hindering conversation around race itself. By reexamining major episodes, texts, writers, and memories of the political past from the seventeenth century to the present, Bruyneel reveals the power of settler memory at work in the persistent disavowal of Indigeneity.  In Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), he also shows how Indigenous and Black intellectuals have understood ties between racism and white settler memory, even as the settler dimensions of whiteness are frequently erased in our discourse about race, whether in conflicts over Indian mascotry or the white nationalist underpinnings of Trumpism. Envisioning a new political future, Bruyneel challenges readers to refuse settler memory and consider a third reconstruction that can meaningfully link antiracism and anticolonialism. John Cable will begin a teaching appointment at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in January 2022. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands (Princeton UP, 2021) confronts the harsh truth that the United States was founded on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people and asks what reconciliation might mean in light of this haunted history. In this timely and urgent book, settler historian Margaret Jacobs tells the stories of the individuals and communities who are working together to heal historical wounds—and reveals how much we have to gain by learning from our history instead of denying it. Jacobs traces the brutal legacy of systemic racial injustice to Indigenous people that has endured since the nation’s founding. Explaining how early attempts at reconciliation succeeded only in robbing tribal nations of their land and forcing their children into abusive boarding schools, she shows that true reconciliation must emerge through Indigenous leadership and sustained relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people that are rooted in specific places and histories. In the absence of an official apology and a federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ordinary people are creating a movement for transformative reconciliation that puts Indigenous land rights, sovereignty, and values at the forefront. With historical sensitivity and an eye to the future, Jacobs urges us to face our past and learn from it, and once we have done so, to redress past abuses. Drawing on dozens of interviews, After One Hundred Winters reveals how Indigenous people and settlers in America today, despite their troubled history, are finding unexpected gifts in reconciliation. Brady McCartney is a scholar of religion, history, and environmental studies at the University of Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

A vast and desolate region, the Texas-New Mexico borderlands have long been an ideal setting for intrigue and illegal dealings--never more so than in the lawless early days of cattle trafficking and trade among the Plains tribes and Comancheros. This book takes us to the borderlands in the 1860s and 1870s for an in-depth look at Union-Confederate skullduggery amid the infamous Comanche-Comanchero trade in stolen Texas livestock. In 1862, the Confederates abandoned New Mexico Territory and Texas west of the Pecos River, fully expecting to return someday. Meanwhile, administered by Union troops under martial law, the region became a hotbed of Rebel exiles and spies, who gathered intelligence, disrupted federal supply lines, and plotted to retake the Southwest. Using a treasure trove of previously unexplored documents, authors James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely trace the complicated network of relationships that drew both Texas cattlemen and Comancheros into these borderlands, revealing the urban elite who were heavily involved in both the legal and illegal transactions that fueled the region's economy. James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely's Confederates and Comancheros: Skullduggery and Double-Dealing in the Texas-New Mexico Borderlands (U Oklahoma Press, 2021) deftly weaves a complex tale of Texan overreach and New Mexican resistance, explores cattle drives and cattle rustling, and details shady government contracts and bloody frontier justice. Peopled with Rebels and bluecoats, Comanches and Comancheros, Texas cattlemen and New Mexican merchants, opportunistic Indian agents and Anglo arms dealers, this book illustrates how central these contested borderlands were to the history of the American West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The paradox of Progressivism continues to fascinate more than one hundred years on. Democratic but elitist, emancipatory but coercive, advanced and assimilationist, Progressivism was defined by its contradictions. In Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform (Harvard UP, 2019), Marilyn Lake points to the significance of turn-of-the-twentieth-century exchanges between American and Australasian reformers who shared racial sensibilities, along with a commitment to forging an ideal social order. The book demonstrates that race and reform were mutually supportive as Progressivism became the political logic of settler colonialism. Settlers defined themselves in “New World” terms—both against Old World feudalism and the indigenous peoples that they considered backward and primitive. Lake also shows how indigenous people at times employed the language and tools of progressivism for their own ends, reshaping the broader Progressive movement in the process. John Cable will begin a teaching appointment at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in January 2022. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Political Scientist Efrén Pérez’s new book, Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity (U Chicago Press, 2021), explores the term and category “people of color” and how this grouping has been used within politics, but also how it is has been used by those who are classified as people of color. Pérez examines group identity, language and public opinion, and implicit cognition to explain how marginalization of non-white groups can form a collective group identity that is interchangeable for the individual. Diversity’s Child fills in a rather substantial gap in research about racial and ethnic identity in the United States by surveying people of color about how they think and feel about racial disparities that impact them as well as other groups that are often categorized as people of color. Part of what Pérez finds in the multi-method approach is that politics can be seen as a solution to the inequality that many of those within this broad umbrella category experience and understand. Pérez’s training and research in both political science and political psychology allows him to bring together these connected social science threads and frameworks in exploring the understanding of broad group identity as well as intergroup identity. Diversity’s Child: People of Color and the Politics of identity both conceptualizes and analyzes the identity of people of color by developing meaningful measurements and using Social Identity Theory to examine connections to differing identities. Pérez’s work also thinks through the evolving demographic shifts in the United States, exploring the projection that white Americans will become the minority population by 2050, and what the political ramifications are for the new majority minority. Although the term “people of color” has been used to identify Black, Latino, and other races for some time, Pérez research examines how these groups that are often pulled together under this common identity actually share in this broader category, and whether there are commonalities and concerns across ethnic, racial, and national identities. He does this by gathering data through opinion surveys, experiments, content analysis of newspapers and congressional archives, and in-depth interviews. Pérez’s research indicates that a person’s “color” identity exists and can be measured, and that identifying as a person of color shapes how minorities view themselves and their position within the political system. Diversity’s Child introduces a new perspective into the ongoing conversation about shifting political demographics, and elaborates on how the people of color identity has the capacity to mobilize groups and shape American politics. Pérez’s research also indicates how and where this umbrella category can essentially come undone—how the unifying qualities can be undermined by intergroup antagonisms. As he notes in our discussion, the research that highlights the capacity to bring together African Americans, LatinX Americans, and Asian Americans under the title of “people of color” also has within it the fissures and factions that can disconnect these groups from each other and from shared political pursuits. Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of 40 acres and a mule--the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from. In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others. Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907. Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Andrea Warner's Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography (Graystone Books, 2018) tells the story, often in Buffy's own words, of the life of the remarkable artist and activist. Buffy Sainte-Marie's musical career is as varied and fascinating as those of her Canadian contemporaries Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen, but he work has not always achieved the recognition it deserves. Warner's book is in part an attempt to rectify that by presenting Buffy's complete story to a new generation of readers and listeners. We encounter Buffy as a coffee shop folkie, an electronic music pioneer, and indigenous activist, a Sesame Street cast member, and finally as an elder stateswoman of Canadian music. This is a book for longtime fans or for new initiates who have never heard songs like Power in the Blood, Now That the Buffalo's Gone, The Universal Soldier, or The War Racket. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Through the unique lens of “Indigenized environmental justice,” Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle. As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock (Beacon Press, 2019) gives readers an accessible history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy. Throughout 2016, the Standing Rock protest put a national spotlight on Indigenous activists, but it also underscored how little Americans know about the longtime historical tensions between Native peoples and the mainstream environmental movement. Ultimately, she argues, modern environmentalists must look to the history of Indigenous resistance for wisdom and inspiration in our common fight for a just and sustainable future. John Cable will begin a teaching appointment at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in January 2022. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network (U California Press, 2020) is the true story of how, against all odds, a remote Mexican pueblo built its own autonomous cell phone network—without help from telecom companies or the government. Anthropologist Roberto J. González paints a vivid and nuanced picture of life in a Oaxaca mountain village and the collective tribulation, triumph, and tragedy the community experienced in pursuit of getting connected. In doing so, this book captures the challenges and contradictions facing Mexico's indigenous peoples today, as they struggle to wire themselves into the 21st century using mobile technologies, ingenuity, and sheer determination. It also holds a broader lesson about the great paradox of the digital age, by exploring how constant connection through virtual worlds can hinder our ability to communicate with those around us. Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The Mexican Revolution gave rise to the Mexican nation-state as we know it today. Rural revolutionaries took up arms against the Díaz dictatorship in support of agrarian reform, in defense of their political autonomy, or inspired by a nationalist desire to forge a new Mexico. However, in the Gran Nayar, a rugged expanse of mountains and canyons, the story was more complex, as the region's four Indigenous peoples fought both for and against the revolution and the radical changes it bought to their homeland. To make sense of this complex history, Nathaniel Morris offers the first systematic understanding of the participation of the Náayari, Wixárika, O'dam, and Mexicanero peoples in the Mexican Revolution. They are known for being among the least "assimilated" of all Mexico's Indigenous peoples. It's often been assumed that they were stuck up in their mountain homeland--"the Gran Nayar"--with no knowledge of the uprisings, civil wars, military coups, and political upheaval that convulsed the rest of Mexico between 1910 and 1940. Based on extensive archival research and years of fieldwork in the rugged and remote Gran Nayar, Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico's Gran Nayar, 1910-1940 (U Arizona Press, 2020) shows that the Náayari, Wixárika, O'dam, and Mexicanero peoples were actively involved in the armed phase of the revolution. This participation led to serious clashes between an expansionist, "rationalist" revolutionary state and the highly autonomous communities and heterodox cultural and religious practices of the Gran Nayar's inhabitants. Morris documents confrontations between practitioners of subsistence agriculture and promoters of capitalist development, between rival Indian generations and political factions, and between opposing visions of the world, of religion, and of daily life. These clashes produced some of the most severe defeats that the government's state-building programs suffered during the entire revolutionary era, with significant and often counterintuitive consequences both for local people and for the Mexican nation as a whole. Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Oaxaca, in the view of the Mexican federal government, was in need of serious reform at midcentury. Reports detailing issues of land ownership, language education, and poverty prompted the Institutio Nacional Indigenista (INI) to pursue a number of reforms to integrate Oaxaca and its people into the nation. But where federal policy met local practice, Indigenous Oaxacans had their own ideas and aims for their future in Mexico and the world. The teachers, thinkers, and communities that took indigenista policy into their own hands are the focus of historian A.S. Dillingham's new book, Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2021). Dillingham combines federal documents with ethnographic materials to understand how twentieth-century Oaxacans - especially those connected to education initiatives - navigated the "double bind of indigenismo" that defined state indigenista policy in Mexico. In this "double bind," Indigenous peoples were at once celebrated and singled out as objects to be remade according to national interests. Challenging some federal projects while leveraging others, Oaxacans pursued their own educational initiatives and, in doing so, became critical agents of global anticolonial politics. An insightful engagement with Indigeneity, education, and development, Oaxaca Resurgent makes a strong case for the power and scope of Oaxacan radicalism through the twenty-first century. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Diplomatic relationships between Indigenous sovereigns and colonial and settler governments were defined by language. In some cases, cultural divides were narrowed using common metaphors. In others, objects such as wampum belts were employed as visual records of past agreements. Speeches were carefully recorded, copied, and cited in later negotiations; treaties were ‘signed’ using symbols of name, clan or nation. The treaty texts themselves sit within a constellation of other texts; this is a large, complex and still understudied archive. In Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry (SUNY Press, 2021), Nikki Hessell reveals the ways in which poetic texts figure in diplomacy in the 19th and 20th centuries. The book ranges across the colonial world, from the Grand River Six Nations, the Native South, to the Great Lakes ‘middle ground’. It then turns to South Africa and New Zealand. It is deeply researched and powerfully contextual. It is also reflective, challenging those of us who work on Indigenous / settler relations to position ourselves in relation to the history and texts we study. Nikki Hessell is Associate Professor at Victoria University in Wellington New Zealand. Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), where he co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. His latest publication is Settlers in Indian Country (Cambridge University Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) made headlines around the world in 2016. Supporters called the pipeline key to safely transporting American oil from the Bakken oil fields of the northern plains to markets nationwide, essential to both national security and prosperity. Native activists named it the "black snake," referring to an ancient prophecy about a terrible snake that would one day devour the earth. Activists rallied near the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota for months in opposition to DAPL, winning an unprecedented but temporary victory before the federal government ultimately permitted the pipeline. Oil began flowing on June 1, 2017. The water protector camps drew global support and united more than three hundred tribes in perhaps the largest Native alliance in U.S. history. While it faced violent opposition, the peaceful movement against DAPL has become one of the most crucial human rights movements of our time. Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys' book Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice (U Nebraska Press, 2021) is the story of four leaders--LaDonna Allard, Jasilyn Charger, Lisa DeVille, and Kandi White--and their fight against the pipeline. It is the story of Native nations combating environmental injustice and longtime discrimination and rebuilding their communities. It is the story of a new generation of environmental activists, galvanized at Standing Rock, becoming the protectors of America's natural resources. Ryan Driskell Tate writes on fossil fuels, climate change, and the American West. He holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers University, and is completing a book on fossil fuel development in the Powder River Basin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Can new language reshape our understanding of the past and expand the possibilities of the future? The Crime Without a Name: Combatting Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America (Counterpoint, 2021) follows Pitner’s journey to identify and remedy the linguistic void in how we discuss race and culture in the United States. Ethnocide, first coined in 1944 by Jewish exile Raphael Lemkin (who also coined the term “genocide”), describes the systemic erasure of a people’s ancestral culture. For Black Americans, who have endured this atrocity for generations, this erasure dates back to the transatlantic slave trade and reached new resonance in a post-Trump world. Just as the concept of genocide radically reshaped our perception of human rights in the twentieth century, reframing discussions about race and culture in terms of ethnocide can change the way we understand our diverse and rapidly evolving racial and political climate in a time of increased visibility around police brutality and systemic racism. The Crime Without a Name traces the historical origins of ethnocide in the United States, examines the personal, lived consequences of existing within an ongoing erasure, and offers ways for readers to combat and overcome our country’s ethnocidal foundation. Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

La Paz's Colonial Specters: Urbanization, Migration, and Indigenous Political Participation, 1900-52 (Bloomsbury, 2021) explores the urban history of one of Latin America’s most indigenous large cities in the first half of the twentieth century. Tracing the expansion of the “extramuro,” indigenous neighborhoods beyond the center of the city in these decades, Sierra brings to life the activists who transformed the city leading up to Bolivia’s National Revolution in 1952. Sierra begins by highlighting the racialized debates about space, modernization, and popular politics among elites that dominated Bolivia’s 1925 centenary celebrations and projects for urban development. Many elites hoped to relegate visible signs of indigeneity outside an imaginary line that divided the respectable, wealthy urban core from the mixed indigenous spaces of the urban periphery. However, as Sierra demonstrates, indigenous Bolivians were crucial to the functioning of urban life from the very heart of the old Spanish city to its rapidly expanding markets and outskirts. Therefore, lower class urbanites, indigenous and not, were able to insist upon an alternative vision of the city built upon neighborhood organizations, unions, and popular use of space long before the revolutionary days of urban street battles in April 1952.  This book will be of interest to urban historians and Latin American historians alike. Its careful explorations of gender, race, class and the mechanisms that build urban belonging will make this book essential reading for anyone interested in social movements and popular politics. Finally, by tracing the understudied history of neighborhood associations in the early twentieth century, La Paz’s Colonial Specters provides an essential background for scholars seeking to understand the roots of contemporary neighborhood organizations that continue to dominate Bolivia’s popular politics to this day. Luis Sierra is Associate Professor of History at Thomas More University. Elena McGrath is Assistant Professor of History at Union College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawaiʻi to Kahiki (U Hawaii Press, 2021), Emalani Case explores Indigenous persistence through the concept of Kahiki, a term that is at once both an ancestral homeland for Kānaka Maoli (Hawaiians) and the knowledge that there is life to be found beyond Hawaiʻi’s shores. It is therefore both a symbol of ancestral connection and the potential that comes with remembering and acting upon that connection. Tracing physical, historical, intellectual, and spiritual journeys to and from Kahiki, Emalani frames it as a place of refuge and sanctuary, a place where ancient knowledge can constantly be made anew. It is in Kahiki, she argues, and in the sanctuary it creates, that today’s Kānaka Maoli can find safety and reprieve from the continued onslaught of settler colonial violence, while also confronting some of the often uncomfortable and challenging realities of being Indigenous in Hawaiʻi, in the Pacific, and in the world. In writing that is both personal and theoretical, Emalani weaves the past and the present together, reflecting on ancient concepts and their continued relevance in movements to protect lands, waters, and oceans; to fight for social justice; to reexamine our responsibilities and obligations to each other across the Pacific region; and to open space for continued dialogue on what it means to be Indigenous both when at home and when away. Combining personal narrative and reflection with research and critical analysis, Everything Ancient Was Once New journeys to and from Kahiki, the sanctuary for reflection, deep learning, and continued dreaming with the past, in the present, and far into the future. Emalani Case is a Kanaka Maoli Lecturer in Pacific Studies at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand Holger Droessler is an Assistant Professor of History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on the intersection of empire and labor in the Pacific. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Elder Little Brown Bear (Ernest W Matton) is a spiritual ambassador who blends Traditional teachings with mainstream information to provide holistic healing approaches for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal community members and professional disciplines. What wisdom teachings does he have to offer for healing and the current state of the world at large? Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

A city of modest size, Providence, Rhode Island, had the third-largest Native American population in the United States by the first decade of the nineteenth century. Patricia E. Rubertone's Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) tells their stories at this historical moment and in the decades before and after, a time when European Americans claimed that Northeast Natives had mostly vanished. Denied their rightful place in modernity, men, women, and children from Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pequot, Wampanoag, and other ancestral communities traveled diverse and complicated routes to make their homes in this city. They found each other, carved out livelihoods, and created neighborhoods that became their urban homelands—new places of meaningful attachments. Accounts of individual lives and family histories emerge from historical and anthropological research in archives, government offices, historical societies, libraries, and museums and from community memories, geography, and landscape. Patricia E. Rubertone chronicles the survivance of the Native people who stayed, left and returned, who faced involuntary displacement by urban renewal, who lived in Provi­dence briefly, or who made their presence known both there and in the wider indigenous and settler-colonial worlds. These individuals reenvision the city’s past through everyday experiences and illuminate documentary and spatial tactics of inequality that erased Native people from most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

California is often used as a synecdoche for the United States itself - America in microcosm. Yet, California was, is, and will always be, Native space. This fact is forcefully argued by Damon Akins and William J. Bauer, Jr. in We Are the Land: A History of Native California (University of California Press, 2021). Akins, an associate professor history at Guilford College, and Bauer, a professor of history at UNLV, track the long history of the Pacific Coast, from ocean to mountain, with an emphasis on Native spaces, Native power, and Native resiliency. California historically contained (and indeed, still does contain) a dizzying array of Native nations, tribes, and societies, and We Are the Land does the work of attempting to cover, in some small amount, as many as possible over several centuries worth of history. It is a crisply written survey that doesn't shy away from the horrors of the past, but also dwells on moments of power and activism - this is no simple story of decline and tragedy. California, Akins and Bauer maintain, cannot be understood apart from its Native context - indeed the land and its people are in many ways one and the same. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

During the years of the Early Republic, prominent Native leaders regularly traveled to American cities--Albany, Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, Montreal, Quebec, New York, and New Orleans--primarily on diplomatic or trade business, but also from curiosity and adventurousness. They were frequently referred to as "the Chiefs now in this city" during their visits, which were sometimes for extended periods of time. Indian people spent a lot of time in town. Colin Calloway, National Book Award finalist and one of the foremost chroniclers of Native American history, has gathered together the accounts of these visits and from them created a new narrative of the country's formative years, redefining what has been understood as the "frontier." Calloway's The Chiefs Now in This City: Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America (Oxford UP, 2021) captures what Native peoples observed as they walked the streets, sat in pews, attended plays, drank in taverns, and slept in hotels and lodging houses. In the Eastern cities they experienced an urban frontier, one in which the Indigenous world met the Atlantic world. Calloway's book reveals not just what Indians saw but how they were seen. Crowds gathered to see them, sometimes to gawk; people attended the theatre to watch “the Chiefs now in this city” watch a play. Their experience enriches and redefines standard narratives of contact between the First Americans and inhabitants of the American Republic, reminding us that Indian people dealt with non-Indians in multiple ways and in multiple places. The story of the country's beginnings was not only one of violent confrontation and betrayal, but one in which the nation's identity was being forged by interaction between and among cultures and traditions. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Every good story needs a villain, and some of the early chroniclers of the pilgrim and puritan settlements found all they needed for this type of character in Thomas Morton. Peter C. Mancall tells the story in The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England (Yale UP, 2019), in what reads perhaps like a historical legal thriller novel. Most of our knowledge of Morton comes from the records left by his enemies, but Mancall's new research into this enigmatic figure unveils how this unlikely anti-hero can shed tremendous light on alternate possibilities in the contentious early years of the European-Native encounter. Morton's own writings portray a vision of an altogether different kind of indigenous–settler future. Yet Morton's continued antagonism of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonial governments led to his repeated exile. While he was repudiated by the earliest generations of readers for debauchery and political menace, subsequent generations continue to find in Thomas Morton a countercultural icon in a world dominated by religious dissidents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

This is the second episode of a four-part series featuring the winners and honorable mentions of the 2021 Book Awards for the Association of Asian American Studies. This episode features two of the winners in Creative Writing: Poetry: Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, whose poetry collection Colonize Me explores the lives of those communities and peoples on the intersections of indigeneity, migration, Asian, queerness, and lower class; and Jan-Henry Gray, whose collection Documents traces Gray’s upbringing as a queer undocumented Filipino American. Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley belongs to the Onondaga Nation of Indigenous Americans in New York and is an assistant professor of poetry and nonfiction in Old Dominion University’s MFA program. His poetry collection Colonize Me won the AAAS award in Creative Writing: Poetry. Jan-Henry Gray currently teaches at Adelphi University in New York. Born in the Philippines and raised in California where he worked as a chef, Jan lived undocumented in the U.S. for more than 32 years. His poetry collection Documents won honorable mention in Creative Writing: Poetry. Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Not long ago, the only resource for uncovering our familial pasts was to consult libraries and archives, combing old newspapers for birth announcements and obituaries. These days, many people are turning to websites like Ancestry and 23andMe, taking DNA tests to learn more about their ancestors and where they came from—often discovering long buried secrets and long lost relatives in the process. But for some, the answers to these questions exist not in archives or in their DNA, but within a suitcase. When writer Danielle Geller’s estranged mother passed away, she left behind just eight suitcases of belongings, cataloging her wayward spirit, moving between boyfriends, states, and jobs, at times experiencing homelessness. In her debut memoir, Dog Flowers (One World, 2021), Geller, trained as an archivist, consolidates the most important artifacts from the collection—never before seen photographs, documents, letters, and diaries—piecing together a portrait of the mother she grew up without, and reconnecting with her Navajo heritage in the process. Today on the New Books Network, join us as we sit down to chat with Danielle Geller about her striking family memoir, Dog Flowers, available now from One World (2021). Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies and teaches creative writing and rhetoric & composition. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, and the co-editor of its anthology, The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

As tourists increasingly moved across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a surprising number of communities looked to capitalize on the histories of Native American people to create tourist attractions. Locals staged performances that claimed to honor an Indigenous past while depicting that past on white settlers' terms. Linking the origins of these performances to their present-day incarnations, Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) reveals how they constituted what Dr. Katrina Phillips calls "salvage tourism.” Across time, Phillips argues, tourism, nostalgia, and authenticity converge in the creation of salvage tourism, which blends tourism and history, contestations over citizenship, identity, belonging, and the continued use of Indians and Indianness as a means of escape, entertainment, and economic development. Dr. Katrina Phillips is assistant professor of American Indian history at Macalester College. Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Boston, Philadelphia, London...Fort Loudon, PA. One of these places is not usually included when imagining the crucial scenes of the American Revolution. In Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776 (W. W. Norton, 2018), Dr. Patrick Spero argues that the early West was just as important to the unfolding American Revolution as events in imperial centers and colonial cities. Spero, Librarian and Director for the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, tells the story of the imperial crisis through several Western characters: Ottawa and pan-Indigenous leader Pontiac, Irish trader and diplomat George Croghan, and settlers James and William Smith, among others. In this narrative driven book, Spero describes how Smith and the so-called Black Boys articulated fears, rooted in anti-Native racism, that predated and motivated arguments for independence on the eastern seaboard years before anyone threw tea in Boston Harbor. When viewed from the West, the American Revolution seems less noble and high minded, and far dirtier, more violent, and perhaps more revolutionary, than the story most Americans know. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

This episode will be the first of a four-part series featuring the winners and honorable mentions of the 2021 Book Awards for the Association of Asian American Studies. Since 1987, the book awards at the annual Asian American Studies Association conference (or AAAS) has given valuable attention onto the works in Asian American Studies that have been leading the field, and have spotlighted works that seek to generatively disrupt, challenge, or undo the norms of Asian American Studies, keeping the field dynamic in its ideas, animated in its possible uses, and broadly affective in its possible impacts to educators, organizers, and the general public. This first episode in the series will focus on the book awards in Social Sciences and Literary Studies. First, we will begin with our interview with Jian Neo Chen, whose book Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement (Duke UP, 2019) documents the threads of critical trans of color organizing and theory within the past twenty years. Our second interview will be with Quynh Nhu Le, whose book Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas (Temple UP, 2019) attempts to rethink the categories of indigenous and settler identities, to consider broader transnational forms of racial settler colonialism in the Americas. Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: Dr. Bradley Shreve’s decision to leave academia after he became a parent; his job as the editor of Tribal College: Journal of American Indian Higher Education; what the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) does; and his work as a podcaster interviewing tribal elders. Our guest is: Dr. Bradley Shreve, the editor of Tribal College: Journal of American Indian Higher Education, the quarterly publication of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC). Previously, he taught history and chaired the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Diné College, America’s first tribal college, which is located in the Navajo Nation. Bradley is the author of numerous articles, essays, and the book Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011). Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might be interested in: TCJ  Tribal College Press TCJ student magazine Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings: The Tribal College and World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium Poems, by Thomas Davis The Pathfinders: Women Leaders in the Tribal College Movement  Remembering Diné College: Origin Stories of America’s First Tribal College Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism by Bradley Shreve A Conversation with Verna Fowler [Audio Podcast]. Native American Studies channel on NBN Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Inseparable from its communities, Northwest Coast art functions aesthetically and performatively beyond the scope of non-Indigenous scholarship, from demonstrating kinship connections to manifesting spiritual power. Contributors to Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast (University of Washington Press, 2020), edited by Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse and Aldona Jonaitis, foreground Indigenous understandings in recognition of this rich context and its historical erasure within the discipline of art history. By centering voices that uphold Indigenous priorities, integrating the expertise of Indigenous knowledge holders about their artistic heritage, and questioning current institutional practices, these new essays "unsettle" Northwest Coast art studies. Key themes include discussions of cultural heritage protections and Native sovereignty; re-centering women and their critical role in transmitting cultural knowledge; reflecting on decolonization work in museums; and examining how artworks function as living documents. The volume exemplifies respectful and relational engagement with Indigenous art and advocates for more accountable scholarship and practices. Kirstin L. Ellsworth holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Indiana University and is Associate Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hills. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Math circles defy simple narratives. The model was introduced a century ago, and is taking off in the present day thanks in part to its congruence with cutting-edge research in mathematics education. It is a modern approach to teaching—or facilitation—that resonates and finds mutual reinforcement with traditional practices and cultural preservation efforts. A wide range of math circle resources have become available for interested instructors, including the MSRI Math Circles Library, now in its 14th year of publication by the AMS. I was excited to talk with three editors and contributors to a recent volume in the series, Inspiring Mathematics: Lessons from the Navajo Nation Math Circles (American Mathematical, 2019). Drs. Dave Auckly, Amanda Serenevy, and Henry Fowler have been instrumental to the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project, along with co-editors Tatiana Shubin and Bob Klein and a broader contact and support network. Their book showcases scripts developed and facilitated in Navajo Nation, including an introduction to modular arithmetic through bean bag tossing, prefix sorting in the guise of pancake flipping, and a tactile use of limiting behavior to folding a necktie. We discussed the origin and expansion of math circles, their potential to indigenous mathematics educators and students, and the content of and stories behind a selection of the scripts. Dr. Fowler's foreword and the editors' introduction situate the math circles movement and the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project in history, geography, and culture. Each script begins with a (minimal!) list of the necessary materials and a student handout that invites explorations with them. A short survey of connections to deeper mathematics precedes each handout, and each is followed by an extensive teacher's guide with (illustrative) solutions and presentation suggestions. The scripts vary in complexity and are suitable for student- and teacher-focused math circles. I hope the text becomes widely adopted for science-based and culturally conscious mathematics education and helps introduce others like myself to the greater math circles project. Suggested companion works: -James Tanton -The Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival -Gordon Hamilton and Lora Saarnio, MathPickle -Robert Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan, Out of the Labyrinth: Setting Mathematics Free -Rachel and Rodi Steinig, Math Renaissance Dave Auckly is a research mathematician at Kansas State University and Co-founder and Director of the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project. Amanda Serenevy is Co-founder and Director of the Riverbend Community Math Center. Henry Fowler is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Navajo Technical University and Co-director of the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project. Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai'i (Duke University Press, 2021), Candace Fujikane draws upon Hawaiian stories about the land and water and their impact upon Native Hawai'ian struggles to argue that Native economies of abundance provide a foundation for collective work against climate change. Fujikane contends that the practice of mapping abundance is a radical act in the face of settler capital's fear of an abundance that feeds. Cartographies of capital enable the seizure of abundant lands by enclosing "wastelands" claimed to be underdeveloped. By contrast, Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) cartographies map the continuities of abundant worlds. Vital to restoration movements is the art of kilo, intergenerational observation of elemental forms encoded in storied histories, chants, and songs. As a participant in these movements, Fujikane maps the ecological lessons of these elemental forms: reptilian deities who protect the waterways, sharks who swim into the mountains, the navigator Māui who fishes up the islands, the deities of snow and mists on Mauna Kea. The laws of these elements are now being violated by toxic waste dumping, leaking military jet fuel tanks, and astronomical-industrial complexes. As Kānaka Maoli and their allies stand as land and water protectors, Fujikane calls for a profound attunement to the elemental forms in order to transform climate events into renewed possibilities for planetary abundance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The western travel narrative genre has a history long tied to voyeurism and conquest. A way to see the world—and its many unique people and places—through the eyes of mostly white and male travelers. In an increasingly globalized world, many writers are beginning to raise questions about the ethics of travel writing and its tropes, especially the way western travelers tend to characterize cultures that are unfamiliar to them. These new books challenge the conventional approach, instead asking readers to consider perspectives other than their own. As a young native woman and member of the Karuk tribe, Ursula Pike joined the Peace Corps because she’d always dreamed of helping others. She was ecstatic to learn she would be assigned to serve in small town Kantuta, Bolivia. While at first Pike looked forward to helping the native people of Kantuta, she quickly realized they had less need for her help—and more to teach her—than she had imagined. In this thoughtful debut, An Indian Among Los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir, Pike examines the complicated ways we help one another, asking timely questions about how one can become of service to a community as an outsider. Today on the New Books Network, join us as we sit down with Ursula Pike to learn more about her memoir, An Indian Among Los Indígenas, available now from Heyday Books (2021). Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies and teaches creative writing and rhetoric & composition. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, and the co-editor of its anthology, The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Paul Radin was one of the founding generation of American cultural anthropologists: A student of Franz Boas,  and famed ethnographer of the Winnebago. Yet little is known about Radin's life. A leftist who was persecuted by the FBI and who lived for several years outside of the United States, and a bohemian who couldn't keep an academic job, there are many chapters in Radin's life which have not been told.  In Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race (Michigan State University Press, 2020), Jack Glazier tells the story of Radin's work at Fisk University in the late 1920s. During his three-year appointment, he and graduate student Andrew Polk Watson collected autobiographies and religious conversion narratives from elderly African Americans. That innovative, subject-centered research complemented like-minded scholarship by African American historians reacting against the disparaging portrayals of black people by white historians. In this book, Glazier describes Radin's commitment to documenting people's own stories as they told them and his respect for them as people as a form of 'radical humanism' and sets Paul Radin's findings within the broader context of Boasian anti-racism, African American culture, and his career-defining work among the Winnebago. In this episode of the podcast Jack Glazier talks to host Alex Golub about Radin and the Boasians, the influence of Charles S. Johnson at Fisk, and how contemporary activists might view the strengths and limitations of Radin's radical humanism.  Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

A close friend and muse of many of postrevolutionary Mexico's greatest artists, Luz Jiménez's likeness appears across Mexico City in the form of painting, photography, and sculpture. Jiménez's ubiquity has earned her the titles of "the most painted woman in all of Mexico" and "the archetype of Indigenous Mexican woman." And yet the details of her complex life as an Indigenous woman at mid century have long remained shrouded by artistic depictions of her face and body. Jiménez's experience of hypervisibility and simultaneous erasure in postrevolutionary Mexico is no anomaly; during the early to mid-twentieth century, Indigenous women were idealized and objectified as relics of Mexico's past as cultural elites sought to manufacture a distinctly mestizo future. The experiences of modern Indigenous women constitute the focus of Natasha Varner's new book, La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2020), a vivid recovery of the intersections of settler colonialism, gender, visual culture, and modernity. Varner employs methods from the fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies and settler colonial studies in an innovative new study of postrevolutionary Mexican visual culture. Drawing upon a range of midcentury media - including newspapers, photography, film, postcards and tourism materials, and more - Varner weaves together narratives of visibility, erasure, survivance, dispossession, and identity that ultimately center upon on Indigenous women's experiences and livelihoods. Despite efforts to erase Indigenous women from Mexico's future, La Raza Cosmética impresses upon us a powerful reminder of Indigenous women's persistence in Mexico - at midcentury as well as in the present. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

John G. Turner's excellent new history of the early American separatists, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty (Yale University Press, 2020) provides a new benchmark study of Plymouth Colony. Turner provides a readable and convincing narrative of how a group of religious refugees sought to establish a home to pursue their radical Protestant faith, while struggling to extend the same liberties to Native peoples and other dissenting groups. This brilliant work of scholarship sheds light on neglected sources and models a striking balance between charitable and critical reading of this significant moment in early American history. Find out more about John Turner on his website or follow him on Twitter (@johngturner2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In 1877, Eloosykasit was on his way Tolo Lake, a gathering place frequented by the Nez Perce, when he heard news of the Wallowa band's flight from the U.S. Army. Only seventeen at the time, Eloosykasit elected to remain with the migrant Nez Perce, arming himself with a rifle abandoned at White Bird Canyon, and following Chief Joseph on toward Montana. Over a century later, in the summer of 1989, Eloosykasit's descendant, Josiah Pinkham, traced the same path as part of an immersive summer program organized entirely around the Chief Joseph Trail. The trip was but one of many ways that the Upward Bound Program - based out of University of Idaho and known regionally as "the Indian Program" - provided Indigenous and non-Indigenous students alike with experiences that recentered Niimíipuu (Nez Perce) and Skitswish (Coeur D'Alene) history and culture. Well-known across the Nez Perce Reservation, Coeur D'Alene Reservation, and nearby communities, Idaho's Upward Bound Program serves as the focus of journalist Tony Tekaroniake Evans' latest book, Teaching Native Pride: Upward Bound and the Legacy of Isabel Bond (Washington State University Press, 2020). Drawing on dozens of interviews with former Upward Bound participants and instructors, Evans traces the development of the program under longtime coordinator Isabel Bond, who has spent decades working to support local Indigenous youth through education. Evans weaves historical narratives both old and recent into a story of community-building and cultural appreciation. Though situated deeply in Nez Perce and Coeur D'Alene history and homelands, Evans' Teaching Native Pride shows the ways that Bond's Upward Bound Program, in many ways, serves as a model for educational experiences that highlight the importance of Indigenous pasts, persistence, experiences, and expertise. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Writing to U.S. President Grover Cleveland in 1888, Oglala Lakota leaders Little Wound, Young Man Afraid of His Horses, and Red Cloud insisted upon a simple yet significant demand to allow western Indigenous nations to retain intertribal communication networks, stating that "we do not want the gates closed between us." These vast networks - and the written letters, in-person visits, and anticolonial ideologies that sustained them - are the focus of historian Justin Gage's new book, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020). Gage shows how sustained communication between reservations enabled a diversity of peoples to share knowledge of common experiences under U.S. settler colonialism, culminating with the rise and rapid spread of the Ghost Dance. Focusing on extensive correspondence between Indigenous communities at over thirty western reservations, Gage elevates the voices of Indigenous leaders, diplomats, family members, and others who sought to use English literacy, one of the United States' primary tools of assimilation, to resist confinement within colonial boundaries. The result is an essential study of how the U.S. federal government struggled and ultimately failed to limit Indigenous mobility and the powerful intellectual currents that helped Indigenous nations to assert their autonomy and sovereignty at the turn of the century. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Behind the braided wigs, buckskins, and excess bronzer that typified the mid-century "filmic Indian" lies a far richer, deeper history of Indigenous labor, survival, and agency. This history takes center stage in historian Liza Black's new book, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), which looks at Indigenous peoples' experiences in the American film industry that so often relied upon and reproduced racialized stereotypes of "authentic Indians" to produce profit. Black shows how non-Native film producers, in producing monolithic and historically static Native caricatures for profit, reinforced settler colonial narratives on screen while simultaneously denying Indigenous actors, extras, and staff of their modernity. Thorough in detail and innovative in analysis, Black incorporates film studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and history, shedding new light on the mid-century film industry and Native peoples' roles in it. Black chronicles the contours of American settler colonialism and its cultural and economic manifestations both on- and off-screen, giving the "authentic Indian" so familiar to non-Native audiences a much-needed dose of historical context. The result is an engaging story of Indigenous talent, labor, and livelihood that transcends critical moments in Native and U.S. histories alike. Listeners can now purchase Picturing Indians using code 6AF20 for a 40% discount on the University of Nebraska Press' site. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia (UP of Mississippi, 2020), Frederick Luis Aldama brings together comics scholars Joshua T. Anderson, Chad A. Barbour, Susan Bernardin, Mike Borkent, Jeremy M. Carnes, Philip Cass, Jordan Clapper, James J. Donahue, Dennin Ellis, Jessica Fontaine, Jonathan Ford, Lee Francis IV, Enrique García, Javier García Liendo, Brenna Clarke Gray, Brian Montes, Arij Ouweneel, Kevin Patrick, Candida Rifkind, Jessica Rutherford, and Jorge Santos to present a comprehensive collection examining Indigenous comic book artists and the history of representations of Indigenous peoples throughout comic book history. This collection highlights the representations and misrepresentations of Indigenous subjects and experiences in comics throughout the Americas and Australasia. In addition, it looked at the work of Indigenous comic artists highlighting texts such as Daniel Parada’s Zotz, Puerto Rican comics Turey el Taíno and La Borinqueña, and Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection. An important volume for comic history and historians, Aldama and contributors bring together the first comprehensive text that show the powerful voices of Indigenous arts and start to address the ways in which the field must start to understand how colonial and imperial domination represented throughout the history of comics still impact Indigenous people and cultures. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital in people's lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Audrey Horning revisits the fraught connections between Ireland and colonial Virginia. Both modern scholars and early modern colonialists themselves viewed English incursions into Ireland and North America as intimately related. But the precise nature of this relationship has been a matter of contention. In the standard narrative, British efforts to establish plantations in Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries prefigured the colonization of Virginia. But Horning shows that such causal connections break down upon closer scrutiny. Ireland in the Virginian Sea deftly brings the tools of archaeology and historical scholarship to bear on British colonialism across the Atlantic. Horning shows that, while colonial ventures in both Ireland and Virginia were personally and financially entangled, the two responded to their unique cultural and geographical contexts. Attempts to impose unidirectional causality dissolve under the burden of Horning’s formidable body of textual and archaeological evidence. What emerges instead is a much more sensitive narrative that accounts for, rather than suppresses, the chorus of voices on either side of the British Atlantic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Our Time is Now: Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is an ambitious exploration of modernity, history, and time in post-colonial Guatemala. Set in the Q’eqchi Maya highlands of Alta Verapaz from the 19th century into the 20th, Julie Gibbings explores how Q’eqchi, ladino, and German immigrant actors created the overlapping, messy and contentious political worlds of modern Guatemala, with attention to the “asymmetric information, expectations, and power ...their mutual misunderstandings and distinct worldviews” of each of these groups. More specifically, Gibbings argues that in the state and coffee planters’ active erasure of Maya political ontologies and worldviews in the nineteenth century created an explosive twentieth century where modernity was always unfulfilled and imminent, but deeply desired by ladino and Maya communities alike. Gibbings seeks to unsettle our view of Guatemalan modernity, and demands that readers attend to the innovative politics and the historical agency of Q’eqchi elites and laborers as well as that of ladinos and Germans. In order to do this, Our Time is Now makes use of sources as diverse as myths about half human cows who haunt German plantations and community interpretations of devastating weather patterns in order to show how Q’eqchi activists’ engaged with both liberal political worlds and their own autonomous values. While Ladino liberals and German settlers both insisted that Mayans were anti-modern, uncivilized, and thus not ready for citizenship by definition, Mayan patriarchs and Q’eqchi liberals argued for their own rights and developed distinct visions of progress. Q’eqchi actors’ engagement with liberal modernity and insistence on their own agency created a “revolutionary time” that “diverged from nineteenth century teleological and linear history.” In the twentieth century, the unfulfilled promises of modernity created revolutions and unrest over and over again. Dr Gibbings is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History and a Lecturer in the History of the Americas for the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. She is also the co-editor of Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution in Post-Peace Guatemala, out this year from the University of Texas Press. Dr Elena McGrath is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Union College. She is working on a manuscript about mineworkers, race, and revolution in Bolivia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Agnès Delahaye’s new book, Settling the Good Land: Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England (Brill, 2020), is the story of John Winthrop’s tenure as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630’s. In a correction to the prevailing narrative of Puritans alone in the New England wilderness, Professor Delahaye shows the colonists’ commercial connections to the Old England and the Atlantic World and how earnestly the magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Company maintained these through promotional writing, where their particular, innovative project of permanent settlement can be traced and contextualized. John Winthrop’s Journal reveals a deep desire for economic independence, or “competency,” born of his frustrations with his limited options in a cramped England, which he played out in a New World—a Promised Land—that he considered to be boundlessly fertile with possibility. Always expanding, Winthrop competed ruthlessly with the indigenous Americans in a “continuous process of rumors, intimidation, conflicts and negotiations, which Winthrop navigated with unwavering confidence in his own racial superiority” (p. 261). Settling the Good Land is a remarkable and magisterial study of a man who simultaneously held (and realized) these ambitions with one hand and to the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the other. Yet, he saw no conflict in them but rather the “fulfillment of his religious and personal calling” (p. 121). Professor Delahaye teaches in Lyon at Université Lumière Lyon II and is a member of the interdisciplinary Triangle Research Group which combines “action, discourses, economic and political thought” to better understand the meeting of political ideas and consequences. Last year she received the rank of habilitation to direct doctoral theses, the highest rank in the French academic system. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In his new book, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America (UNC Press, 2020), Dr. Jeffrey Erbig charts the interplay between imperial and indigenous spatial imaginaries and shows the critical role that indigenous actors played in imperial border-making between the Spanish and the Portuguese in the Río de la Plata region during the mid-to-late eighteenth century. Dr. Erbig demonstrates how this process does not fit neatly into concepts of resistance or accommodation, as Hispano-Portuguese border-drawing from 1750 to the end of the century was in-part necessitated by indigenous actions, shaped by indigenous actors, and even reinforced the authority and autonomy of certain native polities. Far from peripheral players on an inevitable path to destruction as they are mostly remembered today, native peoples were essential to determining the early-modern history of the Río de la Plata. Centering the actions of indigenous agents and incorporating archival material from seven countries along with digital mapping techniques, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met will prove to be an enduring contribution to the historiography of indigenous studies, the Río de la Plata region, cartography, and borderlands topics. Dr. Jeffrey Erbig is an Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Charles F. Walker’s Witness to the Age of Revolution: The Odyssey of Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru, 2020, is part of Oxford University Press’ Graphic History Series, which takes serious archival research and puts it into a comic format. For this volume, the brilliant Liz Clarke illustrated Dr. Walker’s biography of a ½ brother of José Gabriel Condorcanqui Tupac Amaru, the leader of the 1780-1783 Tupac Amaru Rebellion. Juan Bautista was a relatively minor figure in the revolt who was arrested with scores of others in the Spanish repression of the rebellion but was not executed. Instead he spent decades in brutal confinement on three different continents. His life interacts with several phases of the Age of Revolution and offers a subaltern perspective on the era. Listeners should find the Latin American angle on the Age of Revolution particularly enlightening. Witness to the Age of Revolution does a stunning job at literally illustrating the sprawling Spanish empire from Peru to Argentina and Cadiz and on to North Africa. Liz Clarke’s gorgeous artwork bring images of Iberian colonialism to life in vivid color. We also get a solid introduction to maritime history as Juan Bautista is transported halfway around the world. Witness to the Age of Revolution is a fascinating story, comparable to the tales of the Man in the Iron mask as told by Alexandre Dumas. Walker’s account of Juan Bautista’s suffering, the friendship between the Andean prisoner and an Augustinian priest, and the rebel finally achieved his freedom will engross readers. Charles Walker is Professor of History and the Director of the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas at the University of California, Davis, who has held a MacArthur Foundation Endowed Chair in International Human Rights. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Before the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana became one of the state’s top private employers—with its vast landholdings and economic enterprises—they lived well below the poverty line and lacked any clear legal status. After settling in the Bayou Blue in 1884, they forged friendships with their neighbors, sparked local tourism, and struck strategic alliances with civic and business leaders, aid groups, legislators, and other tribes. Coushattas also engaged the public with stories about the tribe’s culture, history, and economic interests that intersected with the larger community, all while battling legal marginalization exacerbated by inconsistent government reports regarding their citizenship, treaty status, and eligibility for federal Indian services. Well into the twentieth century, the tribe had to overcome several major hurdles, including lobbying the Louisiana legislature to pass the state’s first tribal recognition resolution (1972), convincing the Department of the Interior to formally acknowledge the Coushatta Tribe through administrative channels (1973), and engaging in an effort to acquire land and build infrastructure. Basket Diplomacy: Leadership, Alliance-Building, and Resilience among the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, 1884-1984 (University of Nebraska Press) demonstrates how the Coushatta community worked together—each generation laying a foundation for the next—and how they leveraged opportunities so that existing and newly acquired knowledge, timing, and skill worked in tandem. Denise E. Bates is a historian and an assistant professor of leadership and interdisciplinary studies at Arizona State University. David Dry is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

David Tavárez is a historian and linguistic anthropologist; he is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Latin American and Latino/a Studies at Vassar College. He is a specialist in Nahuatl and Zapotec texts, the study of Mesoamerican religions and rituals, Catholic campaigns against idolatry, Indigenous intellectuals, and native Christianities. He is the author or co-author of several books and dozens of articles and chapters. This is his second time on the podcast; the first one was about his edited volume, Words & Worlds Turned Around (2017), and here is the link for that discussion. Today’s interview is about Professor Tavárez’s book The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press), which was first his doctoral dissertation, then was published in 2011, and came out in paperback in 2013. In this book, Professor Tavárez guides his readers through four centuries of the Mexican Inquisition in the episcopal sees of México and Oaxaca. His work is the result of ten years of research in twenty-nine archives in Mexico, Spain, the United States, France, Belgium, Italy, and Vatican City, following 160 judges and 896 defendants accused of “idolatry, sorcery, and superstition”. In this discussion Dr. Tavárez explains the origin and ethos of the ecclesial and judicial authorities, their changes over time, and their internal disagreements. He also describes the nature of the societies they were trying to influence, and how these movements changed since the sixteenth century, following them to the present day. The painting of the 1716 Auto de Fe that is on the cover of his book and that Dr. Tavárez talks about with the host during the interview can be seen here. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Spanish Empire, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. He has also written about missionary efforts in Early Modern Colonial Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In 1800, tens of millions of bison roamed the North American Great Plains. By 1900, fewer than 1,000 remained. In The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (Cambridge UP, 2000), the University of Kansas Hall Distinguished Professor of History Andrew C. Isenberg explains how this ecological calamity came to pass. Bison populations always fluctuated along with changes to the volatile Great Plains climate. The adoption of horse-based nomadism by several Native societies in the 18th and 19th centuries put added pressure on bison populations, but it was the imposition of the capitalist marketplace in the form of white hunters who turned the dynamic bison population into an unsustainable tailspin. In this new 20th anniversary edition with an added foreword and afterword, Isenberg relates the book’s genesis and reflects on its legacy and the historiographical context of environmental history’s early days. Additionally, Isenberg argues that the story of the bison’s destruction serves as a warning to societies like 21st century America that rely overmuch on a single resource survive, and who ignore the chaotic nature of global environments at their own peril. Stephen Hausmann is an Assistant Professor of US History at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and Indigenous history and is currently working on his book manuscript, an environmental history of the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press 2020) is a forceful and captivating book that readers won’t be able to put down, and that listeners from all sort of backgrounds will definitely want to hear more about. Weaving together histories of Black communities (in the US and the Americas more broadly), Native Americans, and multiple Latin Americans countries, Briggs tells us how taking of children has been used as a strategy to terrorize communities that demand social justice and change. This book, timely as no other, asks readers to question the narrative that portrays taking children as something that is done in the benefit of the child, and instead to see it as a strategy that seeks to control and dominate communities that are deem dangerous to the social order. As Prof. Briggs tells us by the end of the interview, in this summer of racial reckoning the BLM movement has asked to eliminate the foster care system for this has been another vehicle for the policing and criminalization of African American communities in the United States. This demand has everything to do with the long history of talking children that is so thoroughly documented in this book. Yet this is not only a “History of American Terror” as the title suggests, it is also a history about how individuals, families, communities and organizations have resisted this terrorizing strategy. Make no mistake: this is not a story with a happy ending, still, it is one that teaches us that in our past lies both the ghostly hauntings that explain why taking children has been a strategy used for terror, but also why therein we can find the seeds to resistance and transformation. Definitely a must for these troubling and convoluted times. Bonus: Prof. Briggs’s son makes a short but hilarious appearance in our conversation. We have decided not to delete this portion of the interview because it demonstrates one of Prof. Briggs main scholarly arguments: the distinction between the private and public is illusory. As with many other topics, the COVID-19 pandemic has only rendered visible the realities that were already there. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Transforming Indigenity: Urbanization and Language Revitalization in the Brazilian Amazon (University of Toronto Press) examines the role that language revitalization efforts play in cultural politics in the small city of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, located in the Brazilian Amazon. Sarah Shulist concentrates on how debates, discussions, and practices aimed at providing support for the Indigenous languages of the region shed light on issues of language revitalization and on the meaning of Indigeneity in contemporary Brazil. São Gabriel has a high proportion of Indigenous people (~85%) and incredible linguistic diversity, with 19 Indigenous languages still being spoken in the city today. Shulist investigates what it means to be Indigenous in this urban and multilingual setting and how that relates to the use and transmission of Indigenous languages. Drawing on perspectives from Indigenous and non-Indigenous political leaders, educators, students, and state agents, and by examining the experiences of urban populations, Transforming Indigeneity provides insight on the revitalization of Amazonian Indigenous languages amid large social change. Sarah Shulist is an assistant professor of Anthropology at MacEwan University. Carrie Gillon received her PhD from the Linguistics program at the University of British Columbia in 2006. She is currently an editor and writing coach and the cohost of the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. She is also the author of ​The Semantics of Determiners and the co-author of Nominal Contact in Michif. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Spanning three hundred years and the colonial regimes of Spain, Mexico, and the United States, Maurice S. Crandall’s These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598–1912 (UNC Press, 2019) demonstrates how Indigenous communities implemented, subverted, rejected, and indigenized colonial ideologies of democracy, both to accommodate and to oppose colonial power. Focusing on four groups--Pueblos in New Mexico, Hopis in northern Arizona, and Tohono O'odhams and Yaquis in Arizona/Sonora--Crandall reveals the ways Indigenous peoples absorbed and adapted colonially imposed forms of politics to exercise sovereignty based on localized political, economic, and social needs. Using sources that include oral histories and multinational archives, this book allows us to compare Spanish, Mexican, and American conceptions of Indian citizenship, and adds to our understanding of the centuries-long struggle of Indigenous groups to assert their sovereignty in the face of settler colonial rule. David Dry is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Managing Multiculturalism: Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia (Stanford University Press) Jean Jackson narrates her remarkable journey as an anthropologist in Colombia for over 50 years. This is an extraordinary book because it shows us Jackson’s trajectory, the challenges she faced, the changes she underwent as a researcher and scholar, and even the mistakes she unknowingly made. The hope is to provide future ethnographers a road map that can be of use when conducting research and tackling the dilemmas that arise from such endeavor—be they ethical, circumstantial, or even personal. Yet this book is not only about methodology, it is also about Colombia’s remarkable indigenous movement, one that represents around 4% of the population and that has been able to gain collective ownership of more than 30% of Colombia’s territory. Listeners should not be deceived by this remarkable figure for as Jackson tells us indigenous peoples face tremendous inequalities in Colombia today. Multiculturalism and the “right to culture,” as advanced by the state, has brought positive changes to Colombia, Latin America, and the world, still, its problematic entanglement with neoliberalism leaves many problems unanswered. In this interview, Jackson discusses some of the foundational concepts of her work (identity, indigeneity, multiculturalism, neoliberalism) while at the same time she gives listeners a peek of her remarkable trajectory, and provides advice to those interested in conducting ethnographic research. Jean E. Jackson is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities (Living Justice Press, 2020) consists of stories that have arisen from the lived experiences of a broad range of seasoned, loving restorative justice practitioners of color—mostly women—who have fiercely unearthed realities about devastation caused by white practitioners who have unthinkingly worked without a racial or social justice consciousness. This book is thus a wake-up call for European-descended restorative justice practitioners as it is validating for Indigenous practitioners and practitioners of color and enlightening for anyone wishing to explore the intersections of indigeneity, racial justice, and restorative justice. The authors of Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities are Desirée Anderson, Rochelle Arms Almengor, Michelle Armster, Belinda Dulin, Leon Dundas, Sharon Goens-Bradley, Janice Jerome, Gaye Lang, Erica Littlewolf, Shameeka Mattis, Abdul-Malik Muhammad, Christianne Paras, Christina Parker, Gilbert Salazar, Victor Jose Santana, Barbara Sherrod, Johonna Turner, Edward C Valandra, Waŋbli Wapȟáha Hokšíla, Anita Wadhwa, Sheryl R. Wilson, and Robert G. Yazzie. Dr. Edward C Valandra, Waŋbli Wapȟáha Hokšíla is Sičáŋǧu Thitȟuŋwaŋ and was born and raised on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. He has served his Sičáŋǧu Thitȟuŋwaŋ Oyáte nation on the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Council, as an Inter-Tribal Bison Cooperative (ITBC) Board of Directors representative, and as his nation’s seven-member Constitutional Task Force. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In August 1795, Apaches wiped out two Spanish patrols In the desert borderlands of the what is today the American Southwest and Mexican north. This attack ended what had bene an uneasy peace between various Apache groups and the Spanish Empire. In A Bad Peace and A Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795-1799 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), Mark Santiago (the recently retired Director of the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum) examines why this peace broke down, as well as what the ensuing conflict looked like on the ground. Many historians argue that the 1790s were a period of peace in the Spanish/Apache borderlands, and Santiago presents an alternate view: that sustained conflict was the norm in this region during the twilight of the Spanish Empire. A Bad Peace and a Good War is remarkably detailed and well-researched and won the 2019 Robert Utley prize in military history from the Western History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was in many ways the crowning event of the nineteenth century United States. Held in Chicago, the metropolis of the West, and visited by tens of millions of people from around the world, it showcased America’s past, present, and future. And Indigenous people were there at center stage. In Unfair Labor?: American Indians and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), David R. B. Beck, professor of Native American Studies at the University of Montana, addresses the question framed in the title: was the work done by Native people at the exposition fair? Beck goes to great lengths in answering the question and indeed, argues that there was not one single answer. Hundreds of Indigenous people from across North and South America attended the event and gave artifacts to be showcased, and the range of compensation received varied widely. Beck’s study is an entry in the burgeoning field of Native labor history, as well as a new perspective on the much-studied 1893 Chicago fair. Unfair Labor? shows that the story of Indians at the 1893 Expo was complex, dynamic, and often deeply personal. Stephen Hausmann is an Assistant Professor of US History at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and Indigenous history and is currently working on his book manuscript, an environmental history of the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Ryan Hall is the author of Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720-1877, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Beneath the Backbone of the World tells the story of the Blackfoot (Niitsitapi) people who lived and controlled a large region of what is today the U.S. and Canadian Great Plains. Dr. Hall explores how the Blackfoot people were able to hold onto their positions of power within the borderlands as both European and American colonizers encroached on their lands for over a century. Ryan Hall is an Assistant Professor of History and Native American Studies at Colgate University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Professor David Tavárez’s edited volume, Words & Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2017), is a collection of eleven essays from historians and anthropologists grappling with the big questions of the Christianization of Mexico after the Spanish Conquest and using sources in several indigenous languages. The collaborators explore the “quilt” of “vibrant and definitely local Christianities” (in the plural) formed by the dialogue of cultures in each place and in each soul. The philological inquiry into indigenous-language primary sources illuminates the interwoven threads of that quilt. Taken together, the essays also show how the field of Mesoamerican and Colonial Mexican history has blossomed since Robert Ricard’s foundational Spiritual Conquest of Mexico a hundred years ago and James Lockhart’s New Philology fifty years ago. This florescence is the first subject of today’s interview. Dr. Tavárez also summarizes the first century of Franciscan and Dominican forays into Mexico. Then, he gives several examples of religious hybridization, simultaneously functional and concealed, and how he and his colleagues were able to find these out. For example, certain Zapotecs turned the images of Catholic saints around (face to the wall) while performing the sacrifice of a deer, and even those who practiced “ancestor worship and child sacrifice counted themselves as Christian” (52). Finally, Professor Tavárez discusses the last essay in the volume, written by anthopologist Abelardo de la Cruz, who recounts hybrid practices that he observed first-hand in the present-day Huasteca Region of Veracruz. David Tavárez is a historian and linguistic anthropologist; he is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Latin American and Latino/a Studies at Vassar College. He is a specialist in Nahuatl and Zapotec texts, the study of Mesoamerican religions and rituals, Catholic campaigns against idolatry, Indigenous intellectuals, and native Christianities. He is the author or co-author of several books and dozens of articles and chapters. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Spanish Empire, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. He has also written about missionary efforts in Early Modern Colonial Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Sovereignty (Northwestern University Press, 2020) playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle weaves together two stories separated by 170 years but joined by a common dilemma: how can Cherokee people fight for justice under an unjust colonial legal framework? In present-day Oklahoma, Sarah Ridge Polson attempts to bring her abuser to justice using the Violence Against Women Act. In 1835, her ancestors try to defend the inherent jurisdiction of the Cherokee Nation against the encroachments of the state of Georgia. Nagle combines her art as a playwright with her training as a lawyer to craft a taught legal drama that illuminates the complexities of these issues. This is a play about how history is always with us, even when that history has been repressed for generations. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Balancing the Tides: Marine Practices in American Samoa (University of Hawai’i Press, 2020), JoAnna Poblete demonstrates how western-style economics, policy-making, and knowledge building imposed by the U.S. federal government have been infused into the daily lives of American Samoans. American colonial efforts to protect natural resources based on western approaches intersect with indigenous insistence on adhering to customary principles of respect, reciprocity, and native rights in complicated ways. Experiences and lessons learned from these case studies provide insight into other tensions between colonial governments and indigenous peoples engaging in environmental and marine-based policy-making across the Pacific and the globe. This study connects the U.S.-American Samoa colonial relationship to global overfishing, world consumption patterns, the for-profit fishing industry, international environmental movements and studies, as well as native experiences and indigenous rights. The book is available open access here. JoAnna Poblete is an Associate Professor of History at Claremont Graduate University. Holger Droessler is an Assistant Professor of History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on the intersection of empire and labor in the Pacific. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The game of basketball is perceived by most today as an “urban” game with a locale such as Rucker Park in Harlem as the game’s epicenter (as well as a pipeline to the NBA). While that is certainly a true statement, basketball is not limited to places such as New York City. In recent years scholars have written about the meaning of the game (and triumphs on the hardwood) to other groups, such as Asian Americans (Kathleen Yep and Joel Franks) and Mexican Americans (Ignacio Garcia). To this important literature one can now add an examination of the sport in the lives of Native Americans, through Wade Davies' Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970 (University Press of Kansas, 2020). The game, as Davies notes, was not just something imposed upon Natives in locales such as the Indian Industrial Training School in Haskell, Kansas (and elsewhere). The game provided linkages to the Native past, and was embraced as a way to “prove their worth” within a hostile environment designed to strip students of all vestiges of their cultural inheritance. The sport provided both young men and women with an opportunity to compete against members of other institutions (both Native and white) and to challenge notions of inferiority and inherent weaknesses. Davies’ work does an excellent job of detailing the role of the sport in the lives of individuals, schools, and eventually, Native communities. Additionally, it examines how these players competed against sometimes seven opponents (the five players on the court and the two officials) to claim their rightful place on the court. They also often had to deal with the taunts and racism of crowds at opposing gyms. Still, most of these schools managed to field competitive teams that created their own “Indian” style of basketball that proved quite difficult to defeat. Wade Davies is professor of Native American studies at the University of Montana, Missoula. Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

St. Louis, Missouri is the city with the highest rate of police shootings in the United States. It’s the city with an 18 year difference in life expectancy between Black and white neighborhoods which stand just 10 miles apart. It’s the city where, after Mike Brown was shot in 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement was born. It is also, now, the city whose history offers essential lessons about the history of the United States as a whole, thanks to Walter Johnson’s indispensable new book The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (Basic Books). The book tracks how anti-Blackness in America has long had everything to do with imperialism, working as much by removal as by predation. Imperial racism was at play when 19th-century settlers demanded Native land west of the Mississippi as compensation for abolition, when they tried to make the end of slavery would go hand in hand with the removal of free black people, or when they massacred black workers for strike-breaking instead of organizing across racial divides in the 20th century. However, the book also shows that the city’s radicalism has never been far from the surface. From the 1877 strike where the proletariat literally took control of the city for a day, to the 1930s when Black women led successful multiracial organizing, people have fought the racial capitalist status quo. The status quo has fought back, shapeshifting from genocide to lynching to strike-breaking to redlining, ultimately building white supremacy into the very fabric of the city’s material infrastructure. It is this “structural racism” which we need to understand and unbuild if we are to create truly anti-racist, decolonial futures, and this book is a must-read for everyone – historians, organizers, allies, citizens – interested in taking that first step. Walter Johnson is Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Social Anthropology at Harvard University studying the reproduction of inequality through development projects in rural western India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

For the second time, Nick Estes has been gracious enough to participate in a New Books Network podcast to discuss his book Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019). (Listen to Ryan Tate’s interview for New Books in the American West here). This second interview focuses more on a genocide studies reading of Dr. Estes’ book, raising questions about the history of genocide against Indigenous peoples, as well as Indigenous resistance and survival. It also seeks to connect Dr. Estes’ book to subsequent events in the United States and around the world, including the pandemic and protest movements. Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Jeff Bachman is a Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. He is the author of The United States and Genocide: (Re)Defining the Relationship and editor of the volume Cultural Genocide: Law, Politics, and Global Manifestations. He is currently working on a new book, The Politics of Genocide: From the Genocide Convention to the Responsibility to Protect, contracted by Rutgers University Press for its Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Today we are joined by Allan Downey, Associate Professor of History and Indigenous Studies at McMaster University, and author of The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood (University of British Columbia Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of lacrosse, the cultural genocide of North America’s indigenous nations, and the games use as a site of empowerment and resistance. In The Creator’s Game, Downey examines the role that lacrosse played and continues to play in the construction of settler-colonial and indigenous identity in Canada. He illustrates the way that the Canadian settler-colonial state appropriated the indigenous tradition of lacrosse to help promote white, masculine identities in the 19th century and how First Nation’s people used the game at the same time to reassert their own notions of indigenous identity, including ideas of pan-indigeneity and nested sovereignty. Downey’s work relies upon a wide range of sources including archival documents, extensive secondary source materials, and oral histories. He also makes use of indigenous epistemologies, taking seriously creation stories, medicine rituals, and the orenta power of physical objects. Throughout he mobilizes new methodologies as a way of explaining the special role of lacrosse among indigenous communities, including writing his own subjectivity as an indigenous person and lacrosse player into his history with chapter framing conversations with the trickster/transformer Usdas. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm (Rutgers University Press, 2019), Alison D. Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes draw on eight years of feminist participatory action research conducted with fifty-four Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Chuj, and Mam women to explore Mayan women’s agency in their search for truth, justice, and reparation for harm suffered during the genocidal violence perpetrated by the Guatemalan state at the height of the thirty-six-year armed conflict. The book discusses the complexities of navigating, negotiating, and interpreting informal and formal justice processes, as participated in and experienced by protagonists, women’s rights activists, lawyers, psychologists, Mayan rights activists, and researchers who have accompanied them as intermediaries. Jeff Bachman is a senior lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. He is the author of the United States and Genocide: (Re)Defining the relationship and editor of the volume cultural Genocide: Law, Politics, and Global Manifestations. He is currently working on a new book, The Politics of Genocide: From the Genocide Convention to the Responsibility to Protect, contracted by Rutgers University Press for its Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Many Americans are familiar with the real, but repeatedly stereotyped problem of alcohol abuse in Indian country. Most know about the Prohibition Era and reformers who promoted passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, among them the members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). But few people are aware of how American Indian women joined forces with the WCTU to press for positive change in their communities, a critical chapter of American cultural history explored in depth for the first time in his book In League Against King Alcohol: Native American Women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) Drawing on the WCTU’s national records as well as state and regional organizational newspaper accounts and official state histories, historian Thomas John Lappas unearths the story of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Indian country. Lappas' work reveals how Native American women in the organization embraced a type of social, economic, and political progress that their white counterparts supported and recognized—while maintaining distinctly Native elements of sovereignty, self-determination, and cultural preservation. They asserted their identities as Indigenous women, albeit as Christian and progressive Indigenous women. At the same time, through their mutual participation, white WCTU members formed conceptions about Native people that they subsequently brought to bear on state and local Indian policy pertaining to alcohol, but also on education, citizenship, voting rights, and land use and ownership. Lappas’s book places Native women at the center of the temperance story, showing how they used a women’s national reform organization to move their own goals and objectives forward. Subtly but significantly, they altered the welfare and status of American Indian communities in the early twentieth century. David Dry is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced. John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Protégé of Elsie Clews Parsons and Franz Boas, founder and head of Barnard College's anthropology department, and a trailblazer in Native American linguistics and anthropology, Gladys Reichard (1893–1955) is one of America’s least appreciated anthropologists. Her accomplishments were obscured in her lifetime by differences in intellectual approach and envy, as well as academic politics and the gender realities of her age. Reichard's approach to Native languages put her at odds with Edward Sapir, leader of the structuralist movement in American linguistics. Similarly, Reichard’s focus on Native psychology as revealed to her by Native artists and storytellers produced a dramatically different style of ethnography from that of Margaret Mead, who relied on western psychological archetypes to “crack” alien cultural codes, often at a distance. Nancy Mattina's Uncommon Anthropologist: Gladys Reichard and Western Native American Culture (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019) is the first full biography of Reichard, and examines her pathbreaking work in the ethnography of ritual and mythology; Wiyot, Coeur d’Alene, and Navajo linguistics; folk art, gender, and language; and her exceptional career of teaching, editing, publishing, and mentoring. In this episode of the podcast Nancy talk to host Alex Golub about Reichard's life, her remarkable ethnography Spider Woman, her career as a teacher (including as an instructor of Zora Neale Hurston), how academic politics can erase people from disciplinary memory, and why Reichard's 'humanitarian' values are needed now more than ever. Nancy Mattina holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and is retired faculty and founder of the Writing & Learning Commons at Prescott College, Arizona. She is a contributor to Studies in Salish Linguistics in Honor of M. Dale Kinkade. Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the author of the article "Welcoming the New Amateurs: A future (and past) for non-academic anthropologists" as well as other books and articles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System: Dancing with Native American Epistemology (Palgrave Macmillian, 2019), Shay Welch investigates the phenomenological ways that dance choreographing and dance performance exemplify both Truth and meaning-making within Native American epistemology, from an analytic philosophical perspective. Given that within Native American communities dance is regarded both as an integral cultural conduit and “a doorway to a powerful wisdom,” Welch argues that dance and dancing can both create and communicate knowledge. She explains that dance―as a form of oral, narrative storytelling―has the power to communicate knowledge of beliefs and histories, and that dance is a form of embodied narrative storytelling. Welch provides analytic clarity on how this happens, what conditions are required for it to succeed, and how dance can satisfy the relational and ethical facets of Native epistemology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education. Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia). Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The Trail of Tears, during which the United States violently expelled thousands of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral homelands in the southeast, was anything but inevitable. Nor was it not the only manifestation of the federal government’s hotly debated Indian Removal policy of the 1830s. In his latest book Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (W. W. Norton, 2020), historian Claudio Saunt shows how coalitions between southern slaveholders, social and religious reformers, financiers and speculators, and politicians produced what Saunt argues to be an unprecedently massive deportation initiative aimed at eliminating all Indigenous peoples living east of the Mississippi River. Starting with Jeffersonian policies towards Indigenous lands and communities, Saunt traces the evolution of federal policy through the now infamous Jacksonian removal policy. Saunt shows how controversial the Indian Removal Act was among American politicians, and how a wide-ranging coalition of pro-removalists consistently struggled to force Indigenous communities from their homes. At the crux of pro-removalists troubles were the many forms of resistance Indigenous peoples, communities, and nations used to refuse whatever fate was conjured for them. Unworthy Republic foregoes an oft-repeated history of inevitable erasure, recounting instead how Native resistance and refusal shaped the aggressions and animosity of proponents of removal. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

George Perkins Marsh Prize winning environmental historian and geographer Joseph E. Taylor III's new book, Persistent Callings: Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast (Oregon State University Press, 2019), takes an innovative approach to the history of fisheries and work in the Pacific Northwest. Focusing on the Nestucca river valley, Taylor shows how nature, culture, markets, and technology affected the "callings," or identities, of residents from pre-colonial times to the very recent past. The first chapter gives readers a sense of the Nestucca Native Americans who developed ceremonies that centered on the region's abundant diadromous salmon populations. After this chapter, the book leaps to the second half of the nineteenth century when settler-colonists exterminated and removed Indians and began farming. Taylor shifts attention away from itinerate wage workers as the primary source of labor in the Pacific Northwest and centers his analysis instead on the families who took to the ocean as one of a number of economic survival strategies. After 1927, fishing in Nestucca slowly transformed from a subsistence activity to a form of recreation for tourists. The tourist were incursions in Nestucca but also a source of revenue for locals. Using oral histories as evidence, Taylor spends a lot of time describing the minutia of fishing work; its physicality, technological stagnation, and its dangers. These details expose workers' connections to the landscape, connections which shaped their identities. The short book is a vital addition to environmental studies because of the way that Taylor seamlessly integrates environmental history into the history of one community. His method shows how and why environmental factors should be a part of all historical narratives. Jason L. Newton is a visiting assistant professor of history at Cornell University. His book manuscript, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950, is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on labor and the environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

There is far more to a map than meets the eye. Such is the case in historian Alex Hidalgo’s Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2019), which focuses on the complex lives of dozens of Oaxacan maps created by Indigenous mapmakers. Tracing the legal, social, cultural, and political history of these maps, Hidalgo sheds new light on the purpose, production, and preservation of maps as well as the lives of Indigenous peoples and Spaniards alike involved in their production. The result is a vivid re-orientation of Oaxacan history that speaks to the historical power of collaboration, adaptation, and cartography. Trail of Footprints provides a deep dive into the production and use of maps, focusing specifically on the roles of patrons, painters, and notaries as well as the complex material dimension of mapmaking. Hidalgo lends equal attention to both the broader historical context of mapmaking and the smallest details of each cartographic creation, emphasizing how maps both recorded and created spatial relationships. In tracing the long lives of these maps, Hidalgo demonstrates, among other important interventions, the potency of Indigenous skills, ideas, and ways of knowing in creating and charting Oaxacan history.  Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Pilar M. Herr’s new book Contested Nation: The Mapuche, Bandits, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Chile (University of New Mexico Press, 2019) places the independent Mapuche people and pro-Spanish Pincheira bandits at the heart of Chile’s nineteenth century. During the 1820s, while criollo elites struggled openly between themselves to form a stable, constitutional central government and define the meaning of citizenship, they agreed that the southern third of Chile formed an integral part of their newly-imagined nation. This claim, Herr argues, erased the Mapuche people, who had defended their lands (known to the Spanish as Araucanía) for centuries from the Spanish conquest and subsequent colonial regime. To demonstrate how Mapuche leaders and bandits challenged Chile’s political and territorial claims, and threatened the viability of the young republic, Contested Nation looks at the smoldering war to the death (Guerra a muerte) between Chile and remaining pro-Spanish royalists that spilled over into Araucanía and across the Andes. This focus reveals how Mapuche and Chilean leaders drew on pre-Columbian negotiation rituals, known as parlamentos, alliance-making, and force to resolve the conflict. Herr’s study concludes that Chile’s exclusion of the Mapuche from its evolving definition of “citizen,” and it’s interest in dispossessing the Mapuche of their land to root out bandits and armed opponents, fundamentally altered the meaning of parlamentos and the viability of Mapuche autonomy. Jesse Zarley is an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where he teaches Latin American, Caribbean, and Global History. His research interests include the Mapuche, borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Río de la Plata. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

What did the American Civil War look like from Diné Bikéyah and Apacheria? This is just one of the many questions that drives historian Megan Kate Nelson’s The Three-Cornered War: The Union, The Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), which details the Civil War’s impact on a diversity of historical actors vying for control, opportunity, and survival in the continental southwest. As both the Union and the Confederacy vied for claim to Indigenous lands, Diné, Apache, and other Indigenous nations fought back. The narratives of Juanita, a Diné woman who resisted Union encroachments upon her community and Diné lands, and Mangas Coloradas, a Chiricahua Apache chief who sought to expand and protect Apache territories, reveal the difficult choices Indigenous peoples made in the face of competitive expansion. Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian with a background in the American Civil War, U.S. western history, and American culture. In The Three-Cornered War, Nelson combines meticulous research in military records, letters and diaries, oral histories, and photographs with novel-like prose to tell the story of the American Civil War through the experiences of nine individuals. As Nelson shows how each of these individuals shaped and were shaped by the Civil War in the continental southwest, the result is a history of the American Civil War truly continental in its scope yet deeply individual in its impact. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you. Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In his Relation of the second voyage to Guiana, published in 1596, George Chapman put the imperial ambitions of England into a telling verse couplet. ‘Riches, and Conquest, and Renowne I sing. / Riches with honour, Conquest without bloud’. For the metropolitan gentlemen of early 17th-century London, the colonising project in Virginia was deeply bound up with the tastes and social lives of statesmen. Chapman’s reference to riches and honour signal English ambitions at the outset of a colonising project in which the interior worlds of the state were profoundly transformed. In The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Lauren Working examines a complex trans-Atlantic process of the movement of objects, ideas, and cultural mixing. Colonialism was a civic project that might hold the keys not just to the prosperity and prestige of the kingdom, but to the refashioning of society. But beneath all this lay tensions that stemmed from the encounter with the Native peoples of Tsenacommacah, a place that was marred by violence between settlers and the Powhatan Confederacy. This book places that tension at the fore of a sparkling and detailed study of the ideology of early colonialism and its place in important circuits of ideas and power in London. Lauren Working is a Post-doctoral Researcher on the TIDE Project. Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Moments before his death at the hands of Spanish colonial officials on November 15, 1781, Aymaran leader Túpac Katari assured his apostles as well as his adversaries that he would “return as millions.” As promised, Katari’s presence in Bolivia did not end with his life. In the centuries since his historic siege of La Paz, Katari has returned often, and remains a cornerstone of the five-hundred-year-long rebellion to reclaim and restore an Indigenous world that long predated the formation of Bolivia. Such a rebellion is the topic of Benjamin Dangl’s latest book, The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia (AK Press, 2019), a deep dive into the historical roots and contemporary relevancy of Indigenous-led movements in modern Bolivia. Drawing on fifteen years of journalistic experience in Bolivia, Dangl demonstrates the ways that Aymara, Quechua, and Guaraní intellectuals, activists, and communities use history as a means of resistance. Dangl shows how the Indigenous campesino union, the Andean Oral History Workshop, caciques apoderados, and other Indigenous activists seized historical knowledge and symbolism as their own, reminding the world of their role as agents of historical change. Over the last several decades, such efforts have led to monumental shifts in Bolivian politics that have permanently transformed the past, present, and future of the country. Benjamin Dangl teaches journalism at the University of Vermont where he is Lecturer of Public Communication in the Department of Community Development and Applied Economics. As a specialist of Bolivian politics, Dangl provides New Books listeners with insightful commentary on the historical context and immediate impact of the recent coup that removed Indigenous president Evo Morales from power. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In his new book, How “Indians” Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory (University of Arizona Press, 2019), Dr. Gonzalo Lamana carefully investigates the writings of Indigenous intellectuals of the Andean region during Spanish colonialism. By delving into and reinterpreting the work of Guaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso de la Vega, Lamana effectively articulates the development of critical race theory from its outset in colonial Latin America. By sharing these centuries old texts, Lamana gives important context to today's social climate while reinvigorating voices from the past. As Lamana points out, “Indians” lived in an upside down world - a world of lies that Indigenous intellectuals were unable to expose. Through the work of Lamana and others, that lie is finally being exposed. Gonzalo Lamana is an associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. His teaching and research explores themes of subalternity and indigeneity, race and theology, and meaning-making in the colonial period through a comparative, cross-area and time study of colonial and postcolonial dynamics. Some of his previous publications include Domination without Dominance. Inca-Spanish Encounters in Early Colonial Peru and Pensamiento colonial crítico. Colin Mustful is the author of four historical novels about Minnesota’s settlement and Native history. He holds an MA in history and an MFA in creative writing. He is the founder and editor of a small independent press called History Through Fiction. You can learn more about Colin and his work at colinmustful.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Untangling a Red, White, and Black Heritage: A Personal History of the Allotment Era (U New Mexico Press, 2018), Darnella Davis combines the personal with the national in telling the story of allotment in Indian Territory/Oklahoma. Dr. Davis traces her family story back several generations and explores the contested and complicated nature of race in the United States. Her journey through the archives is a personal one, and draws upon a range of sources form family stories and saved documents, to government records and the tangled history of land sales. Untangling a Red, White, and Black Heritage is about how marriages, births, and lives lived in Oklahoma complicate the story of race in the United States, and describe the histories of Cherokee and Muskogee Creek leaders such as Amos Thornton and the Adams clan, as well as the children of Oklahoma freedmen and women such as John Bowlin. Davis’s story of her kin is a family chronicle, but also a story of how the United States has attempted to put people into ill-fitting boxes based on race. As Davis herself asks, “Do the stories of the Thorntons, Bowlins, Davises, and Adamses tell us that the federal government succeeded in transforming a communal culture into one solely occupied with individual wealth?” Her argument is one that embraces complication and emphasizes how the microcosm of family can encompass a hopeful story of American life. Stephen Hausmann is an Assistant Professor of US History at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and Indigenous history and is currently working on his book manuscript, an environmental history of the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Taking a fresh look at the first two centuries of French colonialism in the Americas, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas (University of North Carolina Press and the Omohundro Institute, 2019), answers the long-standing question of how, and how well, Indigenous Americans and the Europeans who arrived on their shores communicated with each other. French explorers and colonists in the sixteenth century noticed that Indigenous peoples from Brazil to Canada used signs to communicate. The French, in response, quickly embraced the nonverbal as a means to overcome cultural and language barriers. Céline Carayon's close examination of their accounts enables her to recover these sophisticated Native practices of embodied expressions. In a colonial world where communication and trust were essential but complicated by a multitude of languages, intimate and sensory expressions ensured that French colonists and Indigenous peoples understood each other well. Understanding, in turn, bred both genuine personal bonds and violent antagonisms. As Carayon demonstrates, nonverbal communication shaped Indigenous responses and resistance to colonial pressures across the Americas just as it fueled the imperial French imagination. Challenging the notion of colonial America as a site of misunderstandings and insurmountable cultural clashes, Carayon shows that Natives and newcomers used nonverbal means to build relationships before the rise of linguistic fluency--and, crucially, well afterward. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

From pre-contact, to first-contact, to colonization and beyond, Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba (University of Florida Press, 2018) by Luis Martínez-Fernández is an easy-to-read, yet incredibly fascinating and informative book on the history of early Cuba. In this interview, Martínez-Fernández talks about his Latin American upbringing, the history of pre-contact Cuba, the historical context of Western Europe in 1492, the deep connection between sugar production and slavery, and so much more. Key to the New World manages to effortlessly combine multiple elements of Cuban history, people, cultures, and stories with an objective tone and appealing style. As we continue to learn more about the truths of the “discovery” of the Americas, Martínez-Fernández’s book is an essential read toward a further understanding of those truths. Dr. Luis Martínez-Fernández is a professor of history at the University of Central Florida. Born in Havana, Cuba and raised in Lima, Peru and San Juan, Puerto Rico, he holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in History from the University of Puerto Rico and a Ph.D. in History from Duke University. He is recognized as one of the most prolific and influential scholars in the field of Caribbean Studies. He is the author of numerous publications and his new book, Key to the New World, is the winner of the 2018 Florida Book Awards' Bronze Medal for Nonfiction. Colin Mustful is the author of four historical novels about Minnesota’s settlement and Native history. He holds an MA in history and an MFA in creative writing. He is the founder and editor of a small independent press called History Through Fiction. You can learn more about Colin and his work at colinmustful.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them. However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas. In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples (University of California Press, 2018; paperback edition, 2019) is the first book-length study of the writer’s evolving views regarding the aboriginal inhabitants of North America and the Southern Hemisphere, and his deeply conflicted representations of them in fiction, newspaper sketches, and speeches. Using a wide range of archival materials—including previously unexamined marginalia in books from Clemens’s personal library—Kerry Driscoll, Editor for the Mark Twain Papers and Project as well as former Professor of English at the University of Saint Joseph, charts the development of the writer’s ethnocentric attitudes about Indians and savagery in relation to the various geographic and social milieus of communities he inhabited at key periods in his life, from antebellum Hannibal, Missouri, and the Sierra Nevada mining camps of the 1860s to the progressive urban enclave of Hartford’s Nook Farm. The book also examines the impact of Clemens’s 1895–96 world lecture tour, when he traveled to Australia and New Zealand and learned firsthand about the dispossession and mistreatment of native peoples under British colonial rule. This groundbreaking work of cultural studies offers fresh readings of canonical texts such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Roughing It, and Following the Equator, as well as a number of Twain’s shorter works. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In a foreword to Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), the public philosopher James Tully writes that, “Every once in a while, an outstanding work of scholarship comes along that transforms the way a seemingly intractable injustice is seen and, in so doing, also transforms the way it should be approached and addressed by all concerned.” In this second episode in our new series, New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science, we hear from the book’s author, Sarah Marie Wiebe, about what that intractable injustice is, and why hers is one such work of scholarship, which won the 2017 Charles Taylor Book Award. Along the way she discusses environmental reproductive justice, political ethnography, her method of “sensing policy”, and her new book project, Life against a State of Emergency: Interrupting the Gendered Biopolitics of Settler-Colonialism, about which you can read and view more on the University of Minnesota manifold website. Sarah also talks about the remarkable photographic essays in the book, which are the work of her friend and collaborator, Laurence Butet-Roch, who has kindly provided a number of them for New Books network listeners to view online, here, here and here. Listeners interested in the series should also check out the first episode, with Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, on their Interpretive Research Design. Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and currently a project researcher at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), historian Brianna Theobald delivers a long-overdue, comprehensive history of Native women’s reproductive health, rights, and practices. Alternating her focus between the Crow Reservation in Montana and the experiences of Native women across the United States, Theobald shows how Native women navigated and resisted colonial attempts to restrict their bodily autonomy. By extension, argues Theobald, Native women constituted a particularly resilient vanguard of cultural resistance and persistence in the face of an increasingly aggressive, ever-expanding settler colonial system. Reproduction on the Reservation draws on a diverse range of ethnographic sources, health records and correspondence from the Office of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Indian Health Service, oral and tribal histories, and secondary literature. With nuanced analysis and clear prose, Theobald weaves together these sources to highlight the intersections of reproduction, women’s health, and colonialism, and how these historical forces converge upon Native women’s lives throughout the twentieth century. In doing so, Theobald shows how this history continues through the present day, as Native women continue to fight for their reproductive sovereignty, in turn embodying the resilience of their communities, cultures, and histories. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the department of history at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The names of Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse are often readily recognized among many Americans. Yet the longer, dynamic history of the Lakota - a history from which these three famous figures were created - remains largely untold. In Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (Yale, 2019), historian Pekka Hämäläinen, author of The Comanche Empire, aims to provide a comprehensive history of Lakota migration, expansion, resistance, survival, and resilience. In turn, Hämäläinen tells the story of a people who “were - and are - shapeshifters with a palpable capacity to adapt to changing conditions around them and yet remain Lakotas.” With the Lakota as its primary historical agents, Lakota America recontextualizes the history of North America in terms of Lakota actions, interests, and power. Hämäläinen starts with the history of the Oceti Sakowin in the seventeenth-century western Great Lakes. From there, Hämäläinen follows the Lakota’s western trajectory, first to the Mnisose (Missouri River), and then to the sacred Paha Sapa (Black Hills). In both instances of relocation, the Lakota reinvent themselves while retaining their distinct identity and place in the world. Thanks to - rather than in spite of - their adaptive capacities, says Hämäläinen, the Lakota repeatedly exercise their control of their own destiny as well as the arc of North American history more broadly. Lakota America places the Lakota at the center of North American history, tracing its course up to the present day, and illuminating how generations of shapeshifting has ensured the endurance and resilience of Lakota peoples, sovereignty, and history today. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the department of history at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In the 1800s, explorers and whalers returning home from the Arctic described a cold, desolate world, one that could swallow up expeditions without leaving a trace. But this did not describe the Arctic of the Inuit, who called this world their home. Karen Routledge tells the story of Baffin Island’s Inuit community as they came into contact with western whalers and explorers in the nineteenth century. Even though the Inuit worked closely with outsiders, their views of the Arctic world, their ideas about meaning of home, even their concept of time itself remained very different from the men they encountered. Routledge is a historian for Parks Canada. Her book, Do You See Ice?: Inuit and Americans at Home and Away, was recently published by University of Chicago Press (2018). Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

What really happened at “the first Thanksgiving”? In This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (Bloomsbury, 2019), historian David J. Silverman reveals the complex history surrounding the 1621 feast that every November many Americans associate with silver-buckled Pilgrim costumes, Squanto and Massasoit, and miraculous feats of friendship. Silverman bust these myths - and the many others - that skew American interpretations, understandings, and depictions of the Wampanoag peoples’ relationship with Plymouth colonists. This Land is Their Land painstakingly recounts the events leading up to and resulting from the Wampanoag-English alliance, and how the manipulation of this history continues to impact the present. Upon landing at Plymouth Rock four hundred years ago this November, English Separatists were swept up into the powerful currents of a dynamic indigenous world, populated with diverse peoples with diverse interests. Native figures such as Ousamequin, Tisquantum, Corbitant, Epenow, and others occupy center stage in This Land is Their Land, encouraging readers to forego stereotypical depictions of powerful Englishmen and passive Native peoples for a more truthful rendition of Anglo-Native interactions on and around present-day Cape Cod. Silverman draws on twenty years of research and work alongside Wampanoag linguists, historians, and educators in an effort to construct a more honest history of the now-famous Wampanoag-English encounter. Underlying this history is the present reality of Wampanoag peoples who continue to commemorate the last Thursday in November as their Day of Mourning. Illuminating the damages still wrought by colonization and colonial mythologies, This Land is Their Land will leave many readers with much to chew on at the Thanksgiving table. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can follow her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Shortly after the first Europeans arrived in seventeenth-century New England, they began to import Africans and capture the area’s indigenous peoples as slaves. By the eve of the American Revolution, enslaved people comprised only about 4 percent of the population, but slavery had become instrumental to the region’s economy and had shaped its cultural traditions. This story of slavery in New England has been little told. In this concise yet comprehensive history, Jared Hardesty, Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University, focuses on the individual stories of enslaved people, bringing their experiences to life. He also explores larger issues such as the importance of slavery to the colonization of the region and to agriculture and industry, New England’s deep connections to Caribbean plantation societies, and the significance of emancipation movements in the era of the American Revolution. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England (Bright Leaf, An Imprint of University of Massachusetts Press, 2019), is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of New England. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith have written an accessible and important book about the #BlackLivesMatter social movement and broader considerations of, essentially, how we got to where we are, in the United States, in regard to race and racism. They also go on to suggest and encourage readers and citizens to move towards a more equal and better future. Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter (NYU Press, 2019) compiles social science research and data to explain the current situation for white citizens, African-American citizens, Latinx citizens, and citizens of other races in the United States. By laying out, in facts and figures, the very different experiences and daily lives of citizens, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith demonstrate not only the way many individuals live profoundly separate and different lives in the United States, but also to show the many ways in which we, as Americans, speak past each other when we are talking about the fraught issue of race, racism, and racial inequality. Stay Woke provides substantial social science data to buttress the discussion and analysis of race and racism in the United States, and it also has an excellent chapter that provides definitions, context, and understanding of so many of the terms that are used, and often differently conceptualized, by citizens in thinking about race, inequality, and social and political dynamics. The authors also examine the history around structural racism and racial inequality. At the end of each chapter Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith also include other resources that contributed to their research and that extends the substance of each chapter—the resources include podcast, films, documentaries, television shows, websites, books and articles. These resources along with the questions provided for discussion and debate help readers and students think about what they are learning from each section of the book. The final part of the book provides more options for activism while positioning these actions within the American federal system. This book can be used in classes across a variety of disciplines; it is also a text that is accessible and of interest to any citizen who might want to learn more and work towards a better future. Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Early American colonialism is often distinguished by an urban and rural divide. Urban development was a sign of imperial progress. British writers frequently boasted about the size of early Boston and Philadelphia while mocking the scattered settlements of the French. Colonial founders characterized their social experiment as a ‘City on a Hill’, and texts that promoted colonization listed the size and location of a growing number of principal towns and cities. Outside the confines of cities lay different places: the backcountry of settlement and Indian war; an unmapped landscape of forests and rivers. If the town stood out as a site of ordered settlement, the ‘wilderness’ remained a place of mystery and danger. Paul Musselwhite is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. In Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake (University of Chicago Press, 2019), he challenges the conventional view of the Chesapeake as a rural society of tobacco and slavery that prevented the development of towns and cities. He argues that contemporaries argued about urban development in ways that intersected with wider discussions of the political and commercial order of the Chesapeake, and its place in theories of commerce and the state in Britain between the early seventeenth century and the American Revolution. Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

When people today visit or imagine Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world, they often perceive a cold, remote, and pristine body of water, relatively untouched by industrialization. Yet, Lake Superior has experienced substantial environmental change—including today’s impressive but incomplete ecological recovery—in its existence, especially over the last 150 years. So argues the renowned environmental historian Nancy Langston in her latest book, Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World (Yale University Press, 2019). An interdisciplinary scholar to her core, Langston ushers her training in science and history to tell a story of industrial development, ecological change, toxic pollution, and environmental injustice—and yet also one of ecological and human resilience. Much like the topic of her study, Langston moves fluidly across various political jurisdictions, from states and provinces, to national governments and international agreements, to First Nations and tribal territories. In so doing, she gives voice to a host of actors, including indigenous peoples (past and present), corporate executives and technicians in the pulp and paper and mining industries, government regulators and engineers, environmentalists, scientists, environmental justice activists, politicians, union workers, and many others. Sustaining Lake Superior illustrates the promises and limitations of ecological and human resilience, the inseparability of the local from the global, and the ongoing relevance of history for responding some of the most urgent challenges of climate change and environmental injustice. Nancy Langston is Distinguished Professor of Environmental History at Michigan Technological University. Joshua Nygren is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri. His research focuses on the intertwined histories of conservation, industry, and the state in the twentieth-century United States. You can find him on Twitter @joshua_nygren. Thanks to Justin Dean and UCM’s Digital Media Production program for production assistance.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Jeffrey Ostler’s Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (Yale University Press, 2019) is the first of what will be a two-volume set that comprehensively chronicles the devastating effects of U.S. expansionism on Native Nations. Surviving Genocide covers the eastern United States from the 1750s to the start of the Civil War. In it Ostler makes the compelling argument that American democracy relied on Indian dispossession and what officials claimed to be “just and lawful” wars to remove and kill Indians who resisted. Importantly, Ostler’s book documents the resilience of Native people, showing how they survived genocide in the face of serious and diverse threats to their existence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years. The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W. W. Norton, 2019) breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans―the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia―before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would the great modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved? Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, as well as from archival sources, Demuth shows how the social, the political, and the environmental clashed in this liminal space. Through the lens of the natural world, she views human life and economics as fundamentally about cycles of energy, bringing a fresh and visionary spin to the writing of human history. Bathsheba Demuth  is an Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. As an environmental historian, she specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. She has lived in Arctic communities from Eurasia to Canada. Demuth has a B.A. and M.A. from Brown University, and an M.A. and PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley. Steven Seegel (NBN interviewer) is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Environmental racism is visible not only as cancer clusters or the location of grocery stores. It is responsible for the reported gap in IQ scores between white Americans and Black, Latinx, and Native Americans. So argues science writer Harriet Washington in A Terrible to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind (Little, Brown Spark 2019). While acknowledging IQ is a biased and flawed metric, she contends it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. Using copious data and synthesizing a generation of studies, Washington calculates the staggering, population-scale neurological effects of marginalized communities having been forced to live and work in landscapes of waste, pollution, and insufficient sanitation services. She investigates heavy metals, neurotoxins, asthma, deficient prenatal care, bad nutrition, and even pathogens as drags on cognitive development to explain why communities of color are disproportionately affected—and what can be done to remedy this devastating problem. Harriet A. Washington has been the Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada's Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, and a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law. She is the author of Deadly Monopolies, Infectious Madness, and Medical Apartheid, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Christine M. DeLucia is the author of Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, published by Yale University Press in 2018. Memory Lands provides a much needed new account of King Philip’s War which centers the Natives of the Northeast, instead of the English colonizers. Weaving together the history of King Philip’s War and the history of Northeast Native people to the modern day, DeLucia illustrates the many, complex, ways in which history and historical violence are intimately connected to the present day, and rarely ever just part of the past. Christine M. DeLucia is an Assistant Professor of History at Williams College. Her areas of research include Early American history, Native American and Indigenous Studies, material culture, cross-cultural communications, and violence. Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities (University of North Carolina Press—Chapel Hill & The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2019), Andrew Newman, Professor of English at Stony Brook University, analyzes depictions of reading, writing, and recollecting texts in Indian captivity narratives. While histories of literacy and colonialism have emphasized the experiences of Native Americans, as students in missionary schools or as parties to treacherous treaties, captivity narratives reveal what literacy meant to colonists among Indians. Colonial captives treasured the written word in order to distinguish themselves from their Native captors and to affiliate with their distant cultural communities. Their narratives suggest that Indians recognized this value, sometimes with benevolence: repeatedly, they presented colonists with books. In this way and others, scriptures, saintly lives, and even Shakespeare were introduced into diverse experiences of colonial captivity. What other scholars have understood more simply as textual parallels, Newman argues instead may reflect lived allegories, the identification of one’s own unfolding story with the stories of others. In an authoritative, wide-ranging study that encompasses the foundational New England narratives, accounts of martyrdom and cultural conversion in New France and Mohawk country in the 1600s, and narratives set in Cherokee territory and the Great Lakes region during the late eighteenth century, Newman opens up old tales to fresh, thought-provoking interpretations. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood (Duke University Press, 2018), Dean Itsuji Saranillio offers a bold challenge to conventional understandings of Hawai‘i’s admission as a U.S. state. Hawai‘i statehood is popularly remembered as a civil rights victory against racist claims that Hawai‘i was undeserving of statehood because it was a largely non-white territory. Yet Native Hawaiian opposition to statehood has been all but forgotten. Saranillio tracks these disparate stories by marshaling a variety of unexpected genres and archives: exhibits at world's fairs, political cartoons, propaganda films, a multimillion-dollar hoax on Hawai‘i’s tourism industry, water struggles, and stories of hauntings, among others. Saranillio shows that statehood was neither the expansion of U.S. democracy nor a strong nation swallowing a weak and feeble island nation, but the result of a U.S. nation whose economy was unsustainable without enacting a more aggressive policy of imperialism. With clarity and persuasive force about historically and ethically complex issues, Unsustainable Empire provides a more complicated understanding of Hawai‘i’s admission as the fiftieth state and why Native Hawaiian place-based alternatives to U.S. empire are urgently needed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In 1972, the Bureau of Indian Affairs terminated its twenty-year-old Voluntary Relocation Program, which encouraged the mass migration of roughly 100,000 Native American people from rural to urban areas. At the time the program ended, many groups--from government leaders to Red Power activists--had already classified it as a failure, and scholars have subsequently positioned the program as evidence of America’s enduring settler-colonial project. But Douglas K. Miller, Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University, argues in Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century(The University of North Carolina Press, 2019), that a richer story should be told--one that recognizes Indigenous mobility in terms of its benefits and not merely its costs. In their collective refusal to accept marginality and destitution on reservations, Native Americans used the urban relocation program to take greater control of their socioeconomic circumstances. Indigenous migrants also used the financial, educational, and cultural resources they found in cities to feed new expressions of Indigenous sovereignty both off and on the reservation. The dynamic histories of everyday people at the heart of this book shed new light on the adaptability of mobile Native American communities. In the end, this is a story of shared experience across tribal lines, through which Indigenous people incorporated urban life into their ideas for Indigenous futures. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Non-Humans in Amerindian South America: Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals, and Songs (Berghahn, 2018), eleven researchers bring new ethnographies to bear on anthropological debates on ontology and the anthropocene. In this episode of New Books in Anthropology, the book’s editor Juan Javier Rivera Andía talks with host Jacob Doherty about the importance of ethnography for refreshing theoretical conversations, historicizing indigenous cosmologies in the centuries long waves of extractivism that have remade Amerindian worlds, and the persistence of more than human relationships in the face of violence and ecological crisis. Juan Javier Rivera Andía is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology of the Americas, the University of Bonn; his research examines rituals and oral tradition among indigenous groups of the Andes of South America, particularly Quechua-speaking people of central and Northern Peruvian highlands. Jacob Doherty is a research associate in urban mobility at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, and, most recently, the co-editor of Labor Laid Waste, a special issue of International Labor and Working Class History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Psychedelics are not terribly new. And the drug mescaline is certainly not new. Mike Jay's new book, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (Yale University Press, 2019), tells two trippy stories: one that is about Indigenous use and another about Western society's adoption of the drug in culture and medicine. He discusses perceptions of mescaline in science, culture, and the psychedelic renaissance. The book - and the discussion - is eye-opening. Mike Jay is a freelance writer and public intellectual. He is the author of over a dozen books and regularly contributes to the the London Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal and the Literary Review. He works as a curator and exhibit designer for the Wellcome Trust in London. Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

When the British explored the Atlantic coast of America in the 1580s, their relations with indigenous peoples were structured by food. The newcomers, unable to sustain themselves through agriculture, relied on the local Algonquian people for resources. This led to tension, and then violence. When English raiding parties struck Algonquian villages, they destroyed crops and raided food stores. According to English sources, all of this was provoked by the ‘theft’ of a silver drinking cup, perhaps offered to an Algonquian visitor and understood as a gift of hospitality -  a token of a new relationship of equals. For the historian, episodes like this are challenging to explain. We need to treat dismissals indigenous peoples as inferior with much greater scepticism. And we need to recover the intentions of peoples whose actions were interpreted and distorted by the observers who left the ‘historical’ records that we privilege as sources. Rachel Herrmann is Lecturer in Modern American History at Cardiff University. In No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution(Cornell University Press, 2019), she provides a powerfully original examination of how food and hunger structured relations of power in the revolutionary period. The book – which will be published by Cornell this autumn – ranges widely, from the villages of Iroquoia, to the lands of the Cherokee, and along routes taken by Africans to Canada and Sierra Leone. It is a feast, prepared with skill and served with considerable flair. Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Now Peru is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist (Duke University Press, 2016), tells the remarkable story of a campesino and indigenous political activist whose career spanned much of Peru’s twentieth century and whose achievements at the local and national level transformed Peruvian peasant politics. Structured as a testimonial biography co-authored by the activist Manuel Llamojha Mitma himself and framed by historian Jaymie Patricia Heilman, this book is a valuable document of both pre-Shining Path indigenous activism and the history of Cold War Peru. Born into a poor Quechua family in a small community in Ayacucho, Llamojha became one of the most powerful peasant activists in the country, responsible for the expansion of the Confederación Campesina del Perú to the national stage in the 1960s and integral to the debates that shaped Peru’s left before the rise of the Shining Path. Although he was a contemporary of Shining Path founder Abimael Guzmán and a participant in Maoist peasant movements, Llamojha was never a member of the party and rejected Shining Path tactics. Nonetheless, like so many on the Peruvian left, Llamojha and his children were caught up in the repression waged against the party, resulting both Llamojha’s disappearance from political life and the death of his youngest son. Llamojha was a consummate storyteller whose lifelong commitment to protecting his community was only matched by the ambitious scope of his political vision. Throughout his life, Llamojha articulated an indigenous identity and a politics of liberation that was expressed through class but not subsumed to it. His life story and political writings alike reflect thoughtful negotiation between the intimate demands of family and community and the national and international struggles for revolution that Peru and Llamojha helped lead. Heilman’s deft organizational choices and thoughtful framing help render Llamojha’s stories intelligible to specialists as well as readers without a strong background in Peruvian history or the history of indigenous activism. This book should be read by anyone interested in Peruvian or Latin American history, the Shining Path, the Cold War, and indigenous activism. Elena McGrath is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Carleton College. She is a historian of race, revolution, and natural resources in the Andes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Yuko Miki’s book, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil(Cambridge University Press, 2018), was the recent recipient of LASA’s 19th-century section Honorable Mention for Best Book. Frontiers of Citizenship is a beautifully written book that integrates quite seamlessly the history black and indigenous peoples in 19th century Brazil. The book explores the intersections of race and ethnicity, borderlands studies, as well as the intersecting histories of citizenship, popular politics, national identity, emancipation, and labor. In the book, Dr. Miki explores the quandaries of citizenship in a multiracial society and challenges the idea that citizenship is an equally important and equally valued goal for everyone. The book not only demonstrates otherwise, but really helps the reader challenge these widely held assumptions in a compelling and grounded manner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico(University of Texas Press, 2017) examines the long history of how Spanish imperial rule depended upon spatial concentration – the gathering of people and things into centralized spaces – to control populations and consolidate power. Through four case studies spanning nearly 300 years of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico, Nemser illustrates how different modes of concentration -- centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections – reflected the prerogatives and imperatives of domination and expropriation. Compellingly, Infrastructures of Race argues that these spatial infrastructures and strategies were central and instrumental in the creation of racial identities and their inscription upon colonial subjects. Through designed and engineered spaces, racial identities were lived, sensed, and experienced, and as the built environment faded into barely noticeable infrastructure, race as well became naturalized. Infrastructures of Race provides essential historical background for present-day interrogations of how infrastructures – from aged water pipes to search engine algorithms – reinforce persistent racial inequalities. The challenges of de-racializing these often unnoticed foundations require a deep understanding of how race became so imbricated with technological environments. Through Nemser’s case studies, we can better apprehend the hundreds of years of oppression that have been built into our material lives. Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In his book, Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal(University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), Dr. Gregory D. Smithers effectively articulates the complex history of Native Southerners. Smithers conveys the history of Native Southerners through numerous historical eras while properly reinterpreting popular misconceptions about the past in a way that is compelling and easy to understand. Smithers expresses the rich and complex history of Native Southerners as it was while exposing the reality of settler colonialism and U.S. removal policies. As shown throughout the book, Native Southerners were constantly adapting to a changing world. But ultimately Native Southerners flourished, leading Smither to state, “My, how the architects of removal and assimilation failed.” Gregory D. Smithers is an American historian with a particular interest in the rich history of the Cherokee people, Indigenous history in the Southeast, and environmental history. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis. He has taught in California, Hawaii, Scotland, and Ohio. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, where he is a professor of American history and Eminent Scholar in the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University. Colin Mustful has an M.A. in history from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and is currently a candidate for an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Augsburg University. You can learn more about his work at his website: www.colinmustful.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

What happens when scholars approach the category of “indigenous” without presupposing its otherness? Edited by Paula López Caballero and Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo, Beyond Alterity: Destabilizing the Indigenous Other in Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2018) is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that take such an approach to studying indigenous communities and the concept of indigeneity. As the editors explain in the podcast, the indigenous subject has been often assumed to be defined by difference, so scholars tend to overlook the existence of practices, ideas, and politics that do not align with preconceived, essentialized ideas about indigenous alterity. This book examines, on the one hand, the range of lived experiences within indigenous communities, and on the other, the ongoing construction of the category of “indigenous.” Its first section uncovers ways in which indigenous communities’ practices and politics were more similar to than distinct from those of their nonindigenous counterparts. In the podcast, Acevedo-Rodrigo discusses her chapter on the role of Spanish-language schools in indigenous towns during the Porfiriato. The second section explores the changing, debated meanings of “the indigenous” in Mexico in various fields of scientific inquiry. López Caballero synthesizes her findings on anthropological debates on what constituted the indigenous in the 1940s. The editors also make reference to the other contributions to this edited volume on topics from property rights to genomic research. Rachel Grace Newman is joining Smith College in July 2019 as Lecturer in the History of the Global South. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and her dissertation was titled “Transnational Ambitions: Student Migrants and the Making of a National Future in Twentieth-Century Mexico.” She is also the author of a book on a binational program for migrant children whose families divided their time between Michoacán, Mexico and Watsonville, California. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The historian Nick Estes traces two centuries of Indigenous-led resistance and anti-colonial struggle. Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019) moves from settler colonialism and Indian Wars to the front lines of indigenous climate activism today. He places the #NoDAPL movement, to block Dakota Access oil pipeline at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota in 2016, squarely within the tradition of indigenous resistance to settler erasure. The book weaves historical analysis into intergenerational stories and demonstrates that Standing Rock’s demands for native sovereignty and liberation are as much the outcome of history as they a harbinger of things to come. Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He teaches courses on modern United States history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. He is completing a book on energy development in the American West. @rydriskelltate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier (NYU Press, 2019), Ian Saxine, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater State University, shows the dynamic relationship between Native and English systems of property on the turbulent edge of Britain’s empire, and how so many colonists came to believe their prosperity depended on acknowledging Indigenous land rights. As absentee land speculators and hardscrabble colonists squabbled over conflicting visions for the frontier, Wabanaki Indians’ unity allowed them to forcefully project their own interpretations of often poorly remembered old land deeds and treaties. The result was the creation of a system of property in Maine that defied English law, and preserved Native power and territory. Eventually, ordinary colonists, dissident speculators, and grasping officials succeeded in undermining and finally destroying this arrangement, a process that took place in councils and courtrooms, in taverns and treaties, and on battlefields. Properties of Empire challenges assumptions about the relationship between Indigenous and imperial property creation in early America, as well as the fixed nature of Indian “sales” of land, revealing the existence of a prolonged struggle to re-interpret seventeenth-century land transactions and treaties well into the eighteenth century. The ongoing struggle to construct a commonly agreed-upon culture of landownership shaped diplomacy, imperial administration, and matters of colonial law in powerful ways, and its legacy remains with us today. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

What does anti-imperialism look like from the vantage point of North America? In Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad(University of California Press, 2019), Manu Karuka (Barnard College) answers this question by reinterpreting the significance of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of Chinese workers and Indigenous peoples—in particular the Paiute, Lakota, Pawnee, and Cheyenne. Karuka proposes three new concepts—counter-sovereignty, continental imperialism, and modes of relationship— for our understanding of this history. The interdisciplinary scholarship of Empire’s Tracks engages with writers ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Frederick Jackson Turner to Ella Deloria, and draws also from legal, legislative, military, and business records. Ultimately, Karuka gives the lie to exceptionalist narratives of the United States by showing how its transportation infrastructure, like those around the world, emerged violently at the nexus of war and finance. Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

As they explored and struggled to establish settlements in what they called ‘new found lands’, the encounter with the peoples of those lands deeply affected how the British saw themselves. From the onset of colonisation, exotic visitors appeared in London. We recognise their names: Pocahontas, Manteo, Squanto. If you look carefully, they are a constant presence: in the decorative cartouches of 17th and 18th century maps; in the illustrated title pages of texts promoting colonisation; and present, though heavily filtered through the assumptions of British culture, in many other texts – poems, plays, treatises on political theory and philosophy, and in novels – a form that was new, which confronted a world that was ancient. The intensity of this cultural encounter, which is all too familiar to those who work on the history of colonial and federal America, has been overlooked in some circles of British studies. The multi-volume Oxford History of the British Empire, for example, devoted just 2 of 47 essays to the topic of Native Americans, while treatments of British imperial culture do not place enough emphasis on how diplomatic, military, commercial relationships with the Algonquian, Cherokee and Haudenosaunee peoples shaped broader views of the nature and purposes of the imperial project. Robbie Richardson is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Kent. In The Savage and Modern Self: North American Indians in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2018), he examines the cultural presence of Indians in the novels, poetry, plays and material culture of the eighteenth-century. This presence was used as a kind of reflection to grapple with the emergence of consumer culture, the meaning of colonialism, ‘Britishness’ and – one of the preoccupations of eighteenth-century social theorists – the nature of the ‘modern self’. Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Installed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1921 to commemorate the tercentenary of the landing of the Pilgrims, Cyrus Dallin's statue Massasoit was intended to memorialize the Pokanoket Massasoit (leader) as a welcoming diplomat and participant in the mythical first Thanksgiving. But after the statue's unveiling, Massasoit began to move and proliferate in ways one would not expect of generally stationary monuments tethered to place. The plaster model was donated to the artist's home state of Utah and prominently displayed in the state capitol; half a century later, it was caught up in a surprising case of fraud in the fine arts market. Versions of the statue now stand on Brigham Young University's campus; at an urban intersection in Kansas City, Missouri; and in countless homes around the world in the form of souvenir statuettes. As Lisa Blee, Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University, and Jean M. O’Brien, Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, show in Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit (The University of North Carolina Press, 2019), the surprising story of this monumental statue reveals much about the process of creating, commodifying, and reinforcing the historical memory of Indigenous people. Dallin's statue, set alongside the historical memory of the actual Massasoit and his mythic collaboration with the Pilgrims, shows otherwise hidden dimensions of American memorial culture: an elasticity of historical imagination, a tight-knit relationship between consumption and commemoration, and the twin impulses to sanitize and grapple with the meaning of settler-colonialism. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

One of my talking points when hanging out with my fellow diplomatic historians is the painful absence of scholarship on Hawaii. Too many political histories treat Hawaii’s statehood as a kind of historical inevitability, an event that was bound to pass the moment the kingdom was annexed. As I would frequently pontificate, “nobody has unpacked the imperial history of the islands in sufficient detail, nor the fact that their political fate diverged sharply from a number of other possessions.” For better and for worse, Sarah Miller-Davenport has robbed me of this particular talking point by writing a new book on the process of Hawaiian statehood, American imperialism and its relationship to mainland politics and society shortly after statehood. Gateway State: Hawai’i and the Cultural Transformation of American Empire (Princeton University Press, 2019) takes a close look at some of the narratives that have grown up around the islands and unpacks them. She notes that the process of becoming a state was not a foregone conclusion and was in many ways predicated on Hawaii acting as a gatekeeper to Asia. She also notes that while the island’s racism was less fixed in certain ways than mainland racial norms, racism persisted in more subtle forms on the island. What emerges is a close look at how multiculturalism in service of egalitarianism can nevertheless be adapted to imperial norms. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In 1545, a native Andean prospector hit pay dirt on a desolate red mountain in highland Bolivia. There followed the world's greatest silver bonanza, making the Cerro Rico or "Rich Hill" and the Imperial Villa of Potosí instant legends, famous from Istanbul to Beijing. The Cerro Rico alone provided over half of the world's silver for a century, and even in decline, it remained the single richest source on earth. Potosí: The Silver City That Changed the World(University of California Press, 2019), is the first interpretive history of the fabled mining city’s rise and fall. It tells the story of global economic transformation and the environmental and social impact of rampant colonial exploitation from Potosí’s startling emergence in the 16th century to its collapse in the 19th. Kris Lane, France V. Scholes Chair in Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University, provides an invigorating narrative and rare details of this thriving city as well as its promise of prosperity. A new world of native workers, market women, African slaves, and other ordinary residents who lived alongside the elite merchants, refinery owners, wealthy widows, and crown officials, emerge in lively, riveting stories from the original sources. An engrossing depiction of excess and devastation, Potosí reveals the relentless human tradition in boom times and bust. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet(University of Nebraska Press, 2017), author Rosalyn LaPier, an associate professor in environmental studies at the University of Montana, complicates several narratives about Native people and the nonhuman world. Rather than “living in harmony with nature,” as stereotyped by the ecological Indian mythos, the Blackfeet people of the northern plains believed they could marshal supernatural forces to bend the nonhuman world to their will. Stories and narratives about these powerful supernatural forces from Native voices filtered through white anthropologists notes and recordings via a robust storytelling economy that existed on the Blackfeet Reservation during the early decades of the twentieth century. Rather than “exploiting Grandma,” Blackfeet storytellers used their leverage as keepers of Indigenous knowledge to extract cash payments from whites seeking Blackfeet narratives and knowledge. LaPier’s book is part personal narrative, part environmental history, and part religious studies analysis of the Blackfeet and their worldview during the tumultuous transition between independence and reservation life and emphasizes the resilience of Blackfeet religion and spiritual practices up to today. Invisible Reality won multiple prizes from the Western History Association in 2018, including the inaugural Donald L. Fixico Prize in American Indian and Canadian First Nations History. Stephen Hausmann is an Assistant Professor of US History at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and Indigenous history and is currently working on his book manuscript, an environmental history of the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Karin Rosemblatt’s new book, The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), traces how U.S.- and Mexican-trained intellectuals, social and human scientists, and anthropologists applied their ethnographic field work on indigenous and Native American peoples on both sides of the Rio Grande to debates over race, national culture, and economic development. The book’s backdrop—the rise of populist movements and governments in both countries in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, the onset of the Great Depression, and the instabilities of the interwar period in both countries—provides an excellent opportunity to explore how scientific thought inflected the social construction of race and influenced policy in the Americas. Rosemblatt’s transnational methodology moves beyond accepting race in terms of comparison by tackling the longstanding notion that race and racial categories tended to be more fluid in Latin America and more rigid in the U.S. She shows how figures such as Manuel Gamio, John Collier, and Laura Thompson participated in transnational scholarly networks where the relationship between indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities to culture and nationalism was questioned and debated. In highlighting these collaborations, she shows how Latin American expertise on indigenous peoples bestowed political capital to social scientists for developing indigenous policies in Mexico, and unexpectedly, the United States in the case of Collier and the “Indian New Deal.” The books firm commitment to taking seriously these scholars’ ideas and social contexts allows it to see the limitations of seemingly pseudoscientific or racist paradigms and the ways fieldwork forced them to rethink their own notions of backwardness and civilization. Jesse Zarley will be an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where in Fall 2019 he will be teaching Latin American, Caribbean, and World History. His research interests include borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Argentina. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

America’s waterways were once the superhighways of travel and communication. Coursing through a central line across the landscape, with tributaries connecting the South to the Great Plains and the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River meant wealth, knowledge, and power for those who could master it. In Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi(Harvard University Press, 2019), Jacob Lee offers a new understanding of early America based on the long history of warfare and resistance in the Mississippi River valley. Lee, an Assistant Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University, traces the Native kinship ties that determined which nations rose and fell in the period before the Illinois became dominant. With a complex network of allies stretching from Lake Superior to Arkansas, the Illinois were at the height of their power in 1673 when the first French explorers—fur trader Louis Jolliet and Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette—made their way down the Mississippi. Over the next century, a succession of European empires claimed parts of the midcontinent, but they all faced the challenge of navigating Native alliances and social structures that had existed for centuries. When American settlers claimed the region in the early nineteenth century, they overturned 150 years of interaction between Indians and Europeans. Masters of the Middle Waters shows that the Mississippi and its tributaries were never simply a backdrop to unfolding events. We cannot understand the trajectory of early America without taking into account the vast heartland and its waterways, which advanced and thwarted the aspirations of Native nations, European imperialists, and American settlers alike. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The Great West. Middle America. Flyover Country. The expanse of plains, lakes, forests, and farms, between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains has carried many names. Beginning in the twentieth century, Americans began calling it The Heartland, a term that Dr. Kristin L. Hoganson argues carried a specific meaning that has changed across time. In The Heartland: An American History (Penguin, 2019), Hoganson tracks the global history of Champaign, Illinois – a small place with a large history, and, as a professor of history at the University of Illinois, Hoganson’s home for nearly two decades. The Heartland makes a strong case for the Midwest not as a provincial, isolated, region but rather as a place defined by global connections, diasporas, and a wide array of cultures. The book covers a lot of ground, from Kickapoo history to the story of high-bred cattle to a foray into the history of long-distance ballooning. Throughout, Hoganson maintains that just as scholars study the West and the South, the Heartland is deserving of its own status as part of the American regional canon, not because it looks inward, but because of its long history of affecting historical change and being affected by global events. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

With its long and well-documented history, Prince Edward Island makes a compelling case study for thousands of years of human interaction with a specific ecosystem. The pastoral landscapes, red sandstone cliffs, and small fishing villages of Canada’s “garden province” are appealing because they appear timeless, but they are as culturally constructed as they are shaped by the ebb and flow of the tides. Bringing together experts from a multitude of disciplines, the essays in Time and a Place: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016) explore the island’s marine and terrestrial environment from its prehistory to its recent past. Beginning with PEI’s history as a blank slate - a land scraped by ice and then surrounded by rising seas - this mosaic of essays documents the arrival of flora, fauna, and humans, and the different ways these inhabitants have lived in this place over time. The collection, edited by History Professor Edward MacDonald and Communications Professor Joshua MacFadyen of the University of Prince Edward Island, as well as the former Director of Island Studies, Dr. Irené Novaczek, offers policy insights for the province while also informing broader questions about the value of islands and other geographically bounded spaces for the study of environmental history and the crafting of global sustainability. Putting PEI at the forefront of Canadian environmental history, Time and a Place is a remarkable accomplishment that will be eagerly received and read by historians, geographers, scholars of Canadian and island studies, and environmentalists.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Five decades ago, Native American leaders launched a crusade to force museums to return their sacred objects and allow them to rebury their kin. Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to help them recover their looted heritage from museums across the country. As senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Chip Colwell has navigated firsthand the questions of how to weigh the religious freedom of Native Americans against the academic freedom of scientists and whether the emptying of museum shelves elevates human rights or destroys a common heritage. Winner of the 2019 National Council on Public History Book Award, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture(University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers Colwell's personal account of the process of repatriation, following the trail of four objects as they were created, collected, and ultimately returned to their sources: a sculpture that is a living god, the scalp of a massacre victim, a ceremonial blanket, and a skeleton from a tribe considered by some to be extinct. These specific stories reveal a dramatic process that involves not merely obeying the law, but negotiating the blurry lines between identity and morality, spirituality and politics. Things, like people, have biographies. Repatriation, Colwell argues, is a difficult but vitally important way for museums and tribes to acknowledge that fact—and heal the wounds of the past while creating a respectful approach to caring for these rich artifacts of history. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia(New York University Press, 2019), Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History Emerita at New York University, shifts the lens on the well-known narrative of Virginia’s founding to reveal the previously untold and utterly compelling story of the youths who, often unwillingly, entered into cross-cultural relationships—and became essential for the colony’s survival. Their story gives us unprecedented access to both sides of early Virginia. Here for the first time outside scholarly texts is an accurate portrayal of Pocahontas, who, from the age of ten, acted as emissary for her father, who ruled over the local tribes, alongside the never-before-told intertwined stories of Thomas Savage, Henry Spelman, and Robert Poole, young English boys who were forced to live with powerful Indian leaders to act as intermediaries. As Pocahontas, Thomas, Henry, and Robert collaborated and conspired in carrying messages and trying to smooth out difficulties, they never knew when they might be caught in the firing line of developing hostilities.  While their knowledge and role in controlling communication gave them status and a degree of power, their relationships with both sides meant that no one trusted them completely. Written by an expert in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Atlantic history, Pocahontas and the English Boys unearths gems from the archives—Henry Spelman’s memoir, travel accounts, letters, and official reports and records of meetings of the governor and council in Virginia—and draws on recent archaeology to share the stories of the young people who were key influencers of their day and who are now set to transform our understanding of early Virginia. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Diverse in their languages and customs, the Native American peoples of the Great Lakes region—the Miamis, Ho-Chunks, Potawatomis, Ojibwas, and many others—shared a tumultuous history. In the colonial era their rich homeland became a target of imperial ambition and an invasion zone for European diseases, technologies, beliefs, and colonists. Yet in the face of these challenges, their nations’ strong bonds of trade, intermarriage, and association grew and extended throughout their watery domain, and strategic relationships and choices allowed them to survive in an era of war, epidemic, and invasion. In Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600-1870 (Ohio University Press, 2018), David A. Nichols, Professor of History at Indiana State University, offers a fresh and boundary-crossing history of the Lakes peoples over nearly three centuries of rapid change, from pre-Columbian times through the era of Andrew Jackson’s Removal program. As the people themselves persisted, so did their customs, religions, and control over their destinies, even in the Removal era. In Nichols’s hands, Native, French, American, and English sources combine to tell this important story in a way as imaginative as it is bold. Accessible and creative, Peoples of the Inland Sea is destined to become a classroom staple and a classic in Native American history. Ryan Tripp teaches history in California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Richard Oakes was a natural born leader whom people followed seemingly on instinct. Thus when he dove into the icy San Francisco Bay in the fall of 1969 on his way to Alcatraz Island, he knew others would have his back. Kent Blansett tells Richard Oakes’ story in wonderful detail in A Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and Red Power (Yale University Press, 2018). Blansett, an associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, argues that by understanding Oakes’ life and his movement across the United States in the 1960s, we can better understand the origins of the Red Power movement. Prior to landing in San Francisco, Richard Oakes lived in the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne, a borderland region between Canada and the United States. From there he worked with other Mohawks in the ironwork trade, constructing the New York City skyline, and became a legendary figure in the Indian Cities of Brooklyn and Seattle. Although both his time on Alcatraz and his life ended in tragedy, Oakes’ legacy is lasting and undeniable, as Native people staged fish-ins and occupations across North America based on his inspiring leadership. As Oakes himself put it, “Alcatraz was not an island, but an idea.” Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

“Is America an Empire?” is a popular question for pundits and historians, likely because it sets off such a provocative debate. All too often, however, people use empire simply because the United States is a hegemon, ignoring the country’s imperial traits to focus simply on its power. Dr. Daniel Immerwahr’s book How to Hide an Empire: The History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) corrects this by explicitly focusing on the country’s territories and territories overseas possessions. Dr. Immerwahr begins at the country’s founding as apprehension over aggressive westward settlement gave way to enthusiastic land grabs by pioneers such as Daniel Boone. Propelled by an astonishingly high birth rate and immigration, Euroamericans displaced indigenous peoples. In addition to this more familiar narrative, other factors drove territorial expansion. A desperate need for fertilizers led to the annexation of nearly one hundred “guano islands” in the Pacific and Caribbean, followed by the annexation of even more territory following the Spanish-American War in 1898. These new territories, including Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and others enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the United States: they did not enjoy constitutional protections but nevertheless had a close relationship with what they called the mainland. While the United States backed away from traditional colonialism after 1945, what emerged instead was a “pointillist empire” that depended on bases and new uses of older territory to function. Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

One of the enduring questions in American historiography is: just where exactly is the West? In The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge, 2019), Dr. Janne Lahti argues compellingly that the West is a place on the globe, very much interconnected with worldwide currents of history. Lahti, an Academy of Finland Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Helsinki, provides an extensive synthetic work which draws a wide body of the latest literature on the American West to illustrate how scholars are approaching the region’s history in ways that transcend national boundaries. By focusing on movement, migration, disease, violence, and concepts of race and domesticity, Lahti argues that the American West has much in common with other settler colonial zones such as South Africa and Australia. Culturally, the West has maintained global fascination for over a century as well, a fact that drew Dr. Lahti to the scholarly study of the region in the first place. The American West and the World is a prime example of how the global turn in history can uncover new angles on old stories and older regions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

When the young Diné boy Hopi-Hopi ran away from the Santa Fe Indian Boarding School in the early years of the twentieth century, he carried with him no paper map to guide his way home. Rather, he used knowledge of the region, of the stars, and of the Southwest’s ecology instilled in him from before infancy to help navigate over rivers, through mountains, and across deserts. In The Earth Memory Compass: Diné Landscapes and Education in the Twentieth Century (University of Kansas Press, 2018), Farina King argues that education and the creation of “thick” cultural knowledge played, and continues to play, a central role in the survival of Diné culture. King, Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, takes a unique methodological approach in telling the story of Diné education and knowledge. The Earth Memory Compass is, in King’s words, an “autoethnography,” weaving her personal story of cultural discovery and family history into a larger narrative of Indigenous boarding school experiences and deep learning within families and other sites of indigenous education. The book tracks four of the six sacred directions in Diné culture, East, South, West, and North, each connected with a sacred mountain in the Southwest, and in doing so tells a rich and complicated history of how the Diné people resisted and sometimes embraced American education while never losing their own much older forms of knowledge in the process. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Jamestown: The Truth Revealed (University of Virginia Press, 2017; paperback, 2018), William Kelso, Emeritus Head Archaeologist of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project, takes us literally to the soil where the 1607 Jamestown colony began, unearthing footprints of a series of structures, beginning with the James Fort, to reveal fascinating evidence of the lives and deaths of the first settlers, of their endeavors and struggles, and new insight into their relationships with the Virginia Indians. He offers up a lively but fact-based account, framed around a narrative of the archaeological team's exciting discoveries. Unpersuaded by the common assumption that James Fort had long ago been washed away by the James River, William Kelso and his collaborators estimated the likely site for the fort and began to unearth its extensive remains, including palisade walls, bulwarks, interior buildings, a well, a warehouse, and several pits. By Jamestown’s quadricentennial over 2 million objects were cataloged, more than half dating to the time of Queen Elizabeth and King James. Kelso’s work has continued with recent excavations of numerous additional buildings, including the settlement’s first church, which served as the burial place of four Jamestown leaders, the governor’s rowhouse during the term of Samuel Argall, and substantial dump sites, which are troves for archaeologists. He also recounts how researchers confirmed the practice of survival cannibalism in the colony following the recovery from an abandoned cellar bakery of the cleaver-scarred remains of a young English girl. CT scanning and computer graphics have even allowed researchers to put a face on this victim of the brutal winter of 1609–10, a period that has come to be known as the "starving time." Refuting the now decades-old stereotype that attributed the high mortality rate of the Jamestown settlers to their laziness and ineptitude, Jamestown, the Truth Revealed produces a vivid picture of the settlement that is far more complex, incorporating the most recent archaeology and using twenty-first-century technology to give Jamestown its rightful place in history, thereby contributing to a broader understanding of the transatlantic world. Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Peyote occupies a curious place in the United States and Mexico: though prohibited by law, its use remains permissible in both countries for ceremonial practices in certain religions. As Alexander S. Dawson reveals in The Peyote Effect: From the Inquisition to the War on Drugs (University of California Press, 2018), this anomalous position is nothing new, as it existed as far back as the prohibitions on the use of peyote by non-Indians imposed by the Inquisition in Mexico during the colonial period. Though this ban ended with Mexico’s independence, it was not until chemists in Germany and the United States began investigating peyote’s properties in the late 19th century that its usage spread outside of Native American communities. Fears of the drug’s psychoactive effects led to a succession of state-level U.S. bans in the early 20th century, yet these were usually fragmentary in their scope, allowing for its continued usage by Native American communities outside their jurisdictions. The broader use of peyote as a hallucinogen in the 1950s led to more general efforts to outlaw it, yet the exemptions granted for its use by Native Americans in religious practices creates a distinction between them and the larger population akin to the one that existed during the colonial era hundreds of years ago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Black Elk witnessed some of the most monumental moments in the history of the Lakota and the Northern Great Plains: Red Cloud’s War, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the murder of Crazy Horse, Wounded Knee. In his compelling new biography, Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2016), award-winning nonfiction writer and journalist Joe Jackson tells the story of this place and these events through the chronicle of Black Elk’s life. As one of the most globally famous practitioners of Lakota spirituality, Black Elk’s life is well known. Jackson uses an array of sources to breathe new life into his story and presents the complicated, sometimes tragic, sometimes hopeful figure within his historical context. Jackson’s prose is crisp and vibrant, and the narrative of Black Elk’s religious and personal lives make for a page-turning story. Black Elk: The Fife of an American Visionary won the 2017 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

At the dawn of the radio age in the 1920s, Frederick Du Vernet—Anglican archbishop and self-declared scientist—announced a psychic channel by which minds could telepathically communicate across distance. Pamela E. Klassen retalls Du Vernet’s imaginative experiment in her newest book, The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Following Du Vernet’s journey westward across Canada, Klassen examines how contests over the mediation of stories—via photography, maps, printing presses, and radio—reveal the spiritual work of colonial settlement. Pamela Klassen is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Kate Fullagar's and Michael A. McDonnell's edited volume Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) reimagines the Age of Revolution from the perspective of indigenous peoples. Rather than treating indigenous peoples as distant and passive players in the political struggles of the time, this book argues that they helped create and exploit the volatility that marked an era while playing a central role in the profound acceleration in encounters and contacts between peoples around the world. Focusing in particular on indigenous peoples’ experiences of the British Empire, this volume takes a unique comparative approach in thinking about how indigenous peoples shaped, influenced, redirected, ignored, and sometimes even forced the course of modern imperialism. The essays demonstrate how indigenous-shaped local exchanges, cultural relations, and warfare provoked discussion and policymaking in London as much as it did in Charleston, Cape Town, or Sydney. Facing Empire charts a fresh way forward for historians of empire, indigenous studies, and the Age of Revolution and shows why scholars can no longer continue to exclude indigenous peoples from histories of the modern world. These past conflicts over land and water, labor and resources, and hearts and minds have left a living legacy of contested relations that continue to resonate in contemporary politics and societies today. Covering the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Australia, and West and South Africa, as well as North America, this book looks at the often misrepresented and underrepresented complexity of the indigenous experience on a global scale. Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In 1999, the Makahs went out on the Pacific for their first whale hunt in over seventy years. The event drew protests from animal rights activists and local (mostly white) Washingtonians. But to the Makahs, the event was a cause for celebration. Why did the whale hunt hold such divergent meanings for different people along the Northwest Pacific Coast? Joshua Reid, Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington, attempts to answer that question in The Sea is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs (Yale University Press, 2015), which won the Caughey Prize from the Western History Association in 2016, along with several other awards. For centuries, the Makahs valued maritime space as a central part of their homeland. Europeans empires, and later Americans and international institutions, tried to impose their own notions of spatial control and hard borders onto the Pacific Northwest borderland, but often ran up against Native power. The Makahs have repeatedly adapted to changing political and economic circumstances, adopting what Reid calls a “moditional economy” as a means of handling newcomers who tried to commandeer their homeland and its rich seas. The Sea is My Country is a book about Indigenous adaptability and dynamism as well as changing human relationships to maritime ecologies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In his new book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands(Texas A&M University Press, 2017), Brenden W. Rensink asks the question "How do national borders affect and react to Native identity?" To answer this question he compares indigenous peoples who traversed North American borders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--emphasizing migrations of Crees and Chippewas who crossed the border with Canada into Montana and Yaquis from Mexico who migrated into Arizona. Countering the popular myth otherwise, Dr. Rensink employs experiences of the Yaquis, Crees, and Chippewas to depict Arizona and Montana as an active and mercurial blend of local political, economic, and social interests pushing back against and even reshaping broader federal policy. Despite opposition, Crees, Chippewas, and Yaquis gained legal and permanent settlements in the United States, and successfully broke free of imposed transnational identities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Speaking at a 1913 National Geographic Society gala, Hiram Bingham III, the American explorer celebrated for finding the “lost city” of the Andes two years earlier, suggested that Machu Picchu “is an awful name, but it is well worth remembering.” Millions of travelers have since followed Bingham’s advice. When Bingham first encountered Machu Picchu, the site was an obscure ruin. Now designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Machu Picchu is the focus of Peru’s tourism economy. In Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru (The University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Mark Rice, Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College, City University of New York, presents a history of Machu Picchu in the twentieth century—from its “discovery” to today’s travel boom—that reveals how Machu Picchu was transformed into both a global travel destination and a powerful symbol of the Peruvian nation. Rice shows how the growth of tourism at Machu Picchu swayed Peruvian leaders to celebrate Andean culture as compatible with their vision of a modernizing nation. Encompassing debates about nationalism, Indigenous peoples' experiences, and cultural policy—as well as development and globalization—the book explores the contradictions and ironies of Machu Picchu's transformation. On a broader level, it calls attention to the importance of tourism in the creation of national identity in Peru and Latin America as a whole. Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The process of colonialism seeks to demean Indigenous intellect and destroy Indigenous literary traditions. Reconstructing those legacies is thus an act of anti-colonial resistance. This is the impetus behind Noenoe K. Silva’s The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History (Duke University Press, 2017). Silva, Professor of Indigenous Politics at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa, focuses on two writers from Hawai’i’s tumultuous late nineteenth and early twentieth century past. Joseph Poepoe and Joseph Kanepu’u both wrote extensively in Hawaiian language newspapers at a time when American colonial officials worked hard to stamp out the Hawaiian language. Their writing thus constitutes a rare archive of Native Hawaiian language, narrative forms such as mo’olelo, and concepts such as ‘aina. The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen is an argument against settler colonial power structures and an insistent reminder that Native societies across the world have intellectual histories of their own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Between 1769 and 1834, an influx of Spanish, Russian, and then American colonists streamed into Alta California seeking new opportunities. Their arrival brought the imposition of foreign beliefs, practices, and constraints on Indigenous peoples. Edited by Kathleen Hull and John Douglass, Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California (University of Arizona Press, 2018), reorients understandings of this dynamic period, which challenged both Native and non-Native people to reimagine communities not only in different places and spaces but also in novel forms and practices. The contributors draw on archaeological and historical archival sources to analyze the generative processes and nature of communities of belonging in the face of rapid demographic change and perceived or enforced difference. Contributors provide important historical background on the effects that colonialism, missions, and lives lived beyond mission walls had on Indigenous settlement, marriage patterns, trade, and interactions. They also show the agency with which Indigenous peoples make their own decisions as they construct and reconstruct their communities. With nine different case studies and an insightful epilogue, this book offers analyses that can be applied broadly across the Americas, deepening our understanding of colonialism and community. ________________________________________________________________________ Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Histories of rights have too often marginalized Native Americans and African Americans. Addressing this lacuna, Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories (Dartmouth College Press, 2018), expands our understanding of freedom by examining rights theories that Indigenous and African-descended peoples articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As settlers began to distrust the entitlements that the English used to justify their rule, the colonized and the enslaved formulated coherent logics of freedom and belonging. By anchoring rights in nativity, they countered settlers’ attempts to dispossess and disenfranchise them. Drawing on a plethora of texts, including petitions, letters, newspapers, and official records, Yael Ben-zvi, American Studies Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, analyzes nativity’s unsettling potentials and its discursive and geopolitical implications. She shows how rights were constructed in relation to American, African, and English spaces, and explains the obstacles to historic solidarity between Native American and African American struggles. ________________________________________________________________________ Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In the United States of America today, debates among, between, and within Indian nations continue to focus on how to determine and define the boundaries of Indian ethnic identity and tribal citizenship. From the 1880s and into the 1930s, many Native people participated in similar debates as they confronted white cultural expectations regarding what it meant to be an Indian in modern American society. Using close readings of texts, images, and public performances, Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), examines the literary output of four influential American Indian intellectuals who challenged long-held conceptions of Indian identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Kiara M. Vigil traces how the narrative discourses created by these figures spurred wider discussions about citizenship, race, and modernity in the United States. Vigil demonstrates how these figures deployed aspects of Native American cultural practice to authenticate their status both as indigenous peoples and as citizens of the United States. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), David C. Posthumus, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at the University of South Dakota, offers the first revisionist history of the Lakotas’ religion and culture in a generation. He applies key insights from what has been called the “ontological turn,” particularly the dual notions of interiority/soul/spirit and physicality/body and an extended notion of personhood, as proposed by A. Irving Hallowell and Philippe Descola, which includes humans as well as nonhumans. All My Relatives demonstrates how a new animist framework can connect and articulate otherwise disparate and obscure elements of Lakota ethnography. Stripped of its problematic nineteenth-century social evolutionary elements and viewed as an ontological or spiritual alternative, this reevaluated concept of animism for a twenty-first-century sensibility provides a compelling lens through which traditional Lakota mythology, dreams and visions, and ceremony may be productively analyzed and more fully understood. Posthumus explores how Lakota animist beliefs permeate the understanding of the real world in relation to such phenomena as the personhood of rocks, ghosts or spirits of deceased humans and animals, meteorological phenomena, familiar spirits or spirit helpers, and medicine bundles. All My Relatives offers new insights into traditional Lakota culture for a deeper and more enduring understanding of indigenous cosmology, ontology, and religion. Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Cameron Strang’s Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) examines how colonists, soldiers, explorers, and American Indians created and circulated knowledge about the natural world and the inhabitants of the Gulf South. Covering 350 years of imperialism, Frontiers of Science demonstrates both how critical the creation of knowledge about imperial borderlands was to expansion and competition, but also to how diffuse, contested, and unstable these networks were.  Not only explorers, but slave owners and their slaves, American Indians, soldiers, bureaucrats, and merchants all participated in the production of knowledge and shaped the way that the Gulf South was known. Lance C. Thurner is a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University. In July of 2018 he defended his dissertation, titled ‘The Making and Taking of “Indian Medicine”: Race, Empire, and Bioprospecting in Colonial Mexico.’  This work examines how native and low-caste healers and communities became newly integrated into imperial and global networks of science as colonists developed newfound enthusiasm for indigenous medical knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (New York University Press, 2018), edited by Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross, examines the conflict and interplay between settler and indigenous laws in the New World. As British and Iberian empires expanded across the New World, differing notions of justice and legality played out against one another as settlers and indigenous people sought to negotiate their relationship. In order for settlers and natives to learn from, maneuver, resist, or accommodate each other, they had to grasp something of each other’s legal ideas and conceptions of justice. This ambitious volume advances our understanding of how natives and settlers in both the British and Iberian New World empires struggled to use the other’s ideas of law and justice as a political, strategic, and moral resource.  In so doing, indigenous people and settlers alike changed their own practices of law and dialogue about justice.  Europeans and natives appealed to imperfect understandings of their interlocutors’ notions of justice and advanced their own conceptions during workaday negotiations, disputes, and assertions of right.  Settlers’ and indigenous peoples’ legal presuppositions shaped and sometimes misdirected their attempts to employ each other’s law. Natives and settlers construed and misconstrued each other’s legal commitments while learning about them, never quite sure whether they were on solid ground.  Chapters explore the problem of “legal intelligibility”: How and to what extent did settler law and its associated notions of justice became intelligible—tactically, technically and morally—to natives, and vice versa?  To address this question, the volume offers a critical comparison between English and Iberian New World empires.  Chapters probe such topics as treaty negotiations, land sales, and the corporate privileges of indigenous peoples.  Ultimately, Justice in a New World offers both a deeper understanding of the transformation of notions of justice and law among settlers and indigenous people, and a dual comparative study of what it means for laws and moral codes to be legally intelligible. Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900-1950 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Jorge Coronado, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, examines photography to further the argument that intellectuals grafted their own notions of indigeneity onto their subjects. He looks specifically at the Cuzco School of Photography (active in the southern Andes) to argue that photography, in its capacity as a visual and technological practice, can be a powerful tool for understanding and shaping what modernity meant in the region. Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford, 2017) is a dramatic and vibrant story of a little-known Kentucky school, the Choctaw Academy. Christina Snyder, McCabe-Greer Professor of History at Penn State University, argues that this short-lived institution represented both the promise of a multi-ethnic American society, as well as the withering of that dream during the era of Jacksonian Democracy and Indian Removal. Snyder presents several characters, including the Choctaw scion Peter Pitchlynn, the enslaved nurse and sometime-plantation overseer Julia Chinn, and her mate and master, Vice President Richard M. Johnson. Each person’s story (as well as several others) underscores the complicated hierarchies of race and class in antebellum America, as their histories intertwine with that of the Choctaw Academy and its students. Winner of the 2018 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, Great Crossings is a richly told and thickly researched tale that upends simple narratives of pre-Civil War American society, Native nations, and enslaved people. In their place, Snyder tells of complex humans acting by turns graciously and selfishly, with cruelty and with kindness, as the diverse population of the antebellum American West fumbled its way into the modern era. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In the United States, contemporary discourse concerning “the border” almost always centers around the country’s southern boundary shared with Mexico. Rarely, in conversations public or private among Americans is there any discussion of the nation’s northern border with Canada. Whatever the reason (ignorance, indifference, or both) all this changes with the publication of All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands (UNC Press, 2017). In this stunning comparison of life along the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borderlands, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, the award-winning travel writer and Professor of Creative Non-fiction at UNC Chapel Hill, busts the conceptual block that views “the border” as a place of exceptionality. Focusing on the modern-day experiences of Tejanos/as, Mexican nationals, and Akwesasne Mohawks, Griest uncovers startling similarities between people and places separated by nearly 2,000 miles. Whether the issue is drug trafficking, confrontations with the Border Patrol, assimilation, environmental pollution, or health epidemics, Griest records the echoing testimonies of northern and southern border dwellers. Yet, amidst the harrowing tales of struggle and loss, Griest finds another commonality…transcendence! In both the northern and southern borderlands, residents, artists, and people of faith stand their ground by staging individual and collective battles against the forces that threaten communities and livelihoods. Beautifully written with force, empathy, and passion, All the Agents and Saints is required reading for those wishing to transcend the ignorance and indifference that drives so much of the social and political divisions of our day. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, the development of multi-ethnic/racial cities, and the evolution of Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the relationship between Latina/o politics and the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 20th century. You may follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Sharks Upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778-1855 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Utah State University Assistant Professor of History Seth Archer traces the cultural impact of disease and health problems in the Hawaiian Islands from the arrival of Europeans to 1855. Colonialism in Hawaiʻi began with epidemiological incursions, and Archer argues that health remained the national crisis of the islands for more than a century. Introduced diseases resulted in reduced life spans, rising infertility and infant mortality, and persistent poor health for generations of Islanders, leaving a deep imprint on Hawaiian culture and national consciousness. Scholars have noted the role of epidemics in the depopulation of Hawaiʻi and broader Oceania, yet few have considered the interplay between colonialism, health, and culture – including Native religion, medicine, and gender. This study emphasizes Islanders’ own ideas about, and responses to, health challenges on the local level. Ultimately, Hawaiʻi provides a case study for health and culture change among Indigenous populations across the Americas and the Pacific. Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses, such as Native American Cultures and History in North America, at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas (Yale University Press, 2018), edited by Yale University History and American Studies Professor Ned Blackhawk and University of Chicago Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Isaiah Lorado Wilner, is a compelling collection that charts the influence of Indigenous thinkers on Franz Boas, the founder of modern anthropology. In 1911, the publication of Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man challenged widely held claims about race and intelligence that justified violence and inequality. Now, a group of leading scholars examines how this groundbreaking work hinged on relationships with a global circle of Indigenous thinkers who used Boasian anthropology as a medium for their ideas. Contributors also examine how Boasian thought intersected with the work of major modernist figures, demonstrating how ideas of diversity and identity sprang from colonization and empire. Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses, such as Native American Cultures and History in North America, at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Historians and other writers often portray the Ghost Dance religious movement and massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 as endings, the final gasps of armed Native resistance and their older ways of life. This interpretation is backwards for several reasons, argues Dr. Louis Warren, W. Turrentine Professor of U.S. Western History at U.C. Davis. In his Bancroft Prize winning new book, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (Basic Books, 2017), Warren dramatically reorients our understanding of what the Ghost Dance religion was all about. Rather than a backwards looking movement focused on returning to a pre-conquest past, the prophet Wovoka and his disciples attempted to teach and prepare Indigenous people for life on reservations within an industrializing, wage-based economic and social system. Nor did the Ghost Dance die with the bloodshed in South Dakota in 1890, but instead it carried on and continues to be practiced to this day. God’s Red Son is a sweeping reinterpretation of a well-known era in American history, which emphasizes the importance of context to understanding the power of the religion, as well as the fear it caused among white American officials. Warren persuasively argues that the Ghost Dance was but one mark on the timeline of Native American history, rather than an end. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England (Yale University Press, 2018), Brigham Young University Associate Professor Jenny Hale Pulispher demonstrates that Indians, too, could play the land game for both personal and political benefit.  According to his kin, John Wompas was “no sachem,” although he claimed that status to achieve his economic and political ends. He drew on the legal and political practices of both Indians and the English—even visiting and securing the support of King Charles II—to legitimize the land sales that funded his extravagant spending. But he also used the knowledge acquired in his English education to defend the land and rights of his fellow Nipmucs. His biography offers a window on seventeenth-century New England and the Atlantic world from the unusual perspective of an American Indian who, even though he may not have been what he claimed, was certainly out of the ordinary. Drawing on documentary and anthropological sources as well as consultations with Native people, Pulsipher shows how Wompas turned the opportunities and hardships of economic, cultural, religious, and political forces in the emerging English empire to the benefit of himself and his kin. Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses, such as Native American Cultures and History in North America, at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

One summer evening discussion on a front porch sparked Webs of Kinship: Family in Northern Cheyenne Nationhood, Christina Gish Hill’s 2017 book from the University of Oklahoma Press. A friend on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana mentioned that “Dull Knife had a family,” a remark which clarified for Hill the importance of kinship in understanding Indigenous societies on the northern plains. Many historians, ethnographers, and anthropologists have attempted to fit the Cheyenne and other Indigenous people into political boxes such as nation states and tribes. Hill argues that a more accurate method of imagining these Native American polities is by tracing the spiderweb-like links between families and kin across time and space. These networks give the Northern Cheyenne society tremendous resiliency and flexibility, and have allowed them to retain autonomy and land base into the twenty first century. Using the words of several Northern Cheyenne informants, as well as written sources and images, Dr. Hill, an associate professor of anthropology at Iowa State University, recounts the history of the Northern Cheyenne through the tumultuous and tragic nineteenth century, and in doing so presents a compelling example of strength and perseverance through reciprocity and kinship. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In his Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Allan Greer, Canada Research Chair in Colonial North America at McGill University in Montréal, examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England. By focusing on land, territory, and property, he deploys the concept of ‘property formation’ to consider the ways in which Europeans and their Euro-American descendants remade New World space as they laid claim to the continent’s resources, extended the reach of empire, and established states and jurisdictions for themselves. Challenging long-held, binary assumptions of property as a single entity, which various groups did or did not possess, Greer highlights the diversity of indigenous and Euro-American property systems in the early modern period. The book’s geographic scope, comparative dimension, and placement of indigenous people on an equal plane with Europeans makes it unlike any previous study of early colonization and contact in the Americas. Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses, such as Native American Cultures and History in North America, at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In recent years, historians have reevaluated the role of unfree labor in the nineteenth century American West. William S. Kiser, an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University – San Antonio, is part of this historiographical movement. Kiser’s new book, Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle Over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) uses New Mexico as a case study to examine the various forms of coerced labor endemic to multiple successive southwestern societies, including indigenous polities and colonial Spain. Borderlands of Slavery takes an in depth look at how peonage and Indian captivity complicated the seemingly black and white debate over slavery in the antebellum United States, and the important role the question of New Mexico statehood played in enflaming the sectional conflict. The West in general, and New Mexico in particular, became pawns in a national struggle over the future of slavery and freedom, and the institution of peonage thrust the recently conquered southwest into the political spotlight. Kiser’s book is timely and important, and calls for historians to seek out less visible forms of unfreedom that existed well into the twentieth century in sometimes unexpected places. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Historians have gotten the story of the colonial Ohio River Valley all wrong, argues Susan Sleeper-Smith in Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 (Omonundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Sleeper-Smith, a Professor of History at Michigan State University and soon-to-be Interim Director of the D’arcy McNickle Center at the Newberry Library, reads colonial sources against the grain and uses material culture to demonstrate how the Great Lakes region was a prosperous multicultural zone characterized by trade and agriculture well into the eighteenth century. Moreover, women played a central (and heretofore under-appreciated) role in the fur trade and agricultural work that made the Ohio River Valley such a fertile and bountiful region. Indigenous societies such as the Miami, Wea, and Shawnee have often been characterized as living primarily off hunting and suffering through ever-increasing reliance on fur trading and geopolitical chaos wrought by adjacent colonial empires. Sleeper-Smith instead paints a picture of primarily agricultural towns defined by their stability up until the years of American conquest and displacement. Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest is a much needed counterweight to narratives about the early American west which have for decades gone largely unquestioned. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In his book, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008), Pekka Hämäläinen refutes the traditional story that Indians were bit players or unfortunate victims of the white man’s conquest of the American West. Old maps that divided America into Spanish, French, and British territories, Hämäläinen argues, are “fictions” insofar as they entirely miss great indigenous contenders of military, economic, and political power. Such a one were the Comanches who fought, traded, and cooperated—often simultaneously—with European and Native American rivals, and rose to be a dominating power in the Great Plains for almost 200 years. The Comanche Empire brings a riveting narrative in a dialectical spirit to the fields of American, American Indian, Spanish and Mexican Imperial, and Borderlands histories. Professor Hämäläinen is Rhodes Professor at the University of Oxford, specializing in early and nineteenth-century North American history especially in indigenous, colonial, imperial, borderlands, and environmental history—all topics that invite comparative discussion and a global view. His first book was When Disease Makes History: Epidemics and Great Historical Turning Points (2006); The Comanche Empire is his second book; he is currently working on a history of the Lakota-Sioux that will be published next year. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe has quickly emerged as a crucial voice in twenty-first-century American literature. Her innovative, award-winning works of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism capture the complexities of Native American life and interrogate histories of both cultural and linguistic oppression throughout the United States. In LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature (LSU Press, 2018), Kirstin L. Squint (Associate Professor of English at High Point University) expands contemporary scholarship on Howe by examining her nuanced portrayal of Choctaw history and culture as modes of expression. Squint shows that Howe’s writings engage with Native, southern, and global networks by probing regional identity, gender power, authenticity, and performance from a distinctly Choctaw perspective—a method of discourse which Howe terms “Choctalking.” Drawing on interdisciplinary methodologies and theories, Squint complicates prevailing models of the Native South by proposing the concept of the “Interstate South,” a space in which Native Americans travel physically and metaphorically between tribal national and U.S. boundaries. Squint considers Howe’s engagement with these interconnected spaces and cultures, as well as how indigeneity can circulate throughout them. James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Whether through the anxiety of mutually assured destruction or the promise of decolonization throughout Asia and Africa, Cold War politics had a peculiar temporality. In Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Joanna Radin explores the conjuncture of time and temperature in Cold War “salvage biology” projects. Cryobiology, genetic epidemiology, and freezer anthropology constructed a dense and tangled global infrastructure of blood circulation. By following these circuits, Radin weaves a narrative about the Cold War human sciences that takes readers up to present ethical debates about the insufficiency of informed consent and the need to better involve communities whose vital materials have been taken for the sake of biomedical research. This book will be of interest to all historians of science, technology, and medicine, as well as to anthropologists and scholars working in Native American and Indigenous Studies. Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Researching and writing about infrastructure is a tall task. Infrastructure’s vastness, complexity, and, if it’s functioning, invisibility can defy narratives. Andrew Needham, however, succeeds beautifully. His book, called Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton University Press, 2016), tells the important and dramatic story of how the creation and development of a regional energy system linked Southwestern metropolitan and rural spaces. The book, Needham writes, “constructs a broad new map of postwar urban, environmental, and political change.” Needham shows how that system produced and concealed geographic inequality. Post-World War II Southwest cities depended on abundant cheap energy, namely coal, and the primary source was far away in the Navajo lands. In addition to fueling the rapid metropolitan development, those lands also absorbed the majority of the energy system’s pollution. In other words, while city-dwellers and suburbanites consumed cheap energy, the Navajo bore the brunt of the ecological costs. The book would be of interest to urban historians, environmental historians, Native American studies scholars, historians of technology, and anyone wanting to engage in discussions of inequality and ecology. Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In a remarkable new book, Daniel Heath Justice, an author and professor of First Nations and Indigenous Studies and English at the University of British Columbia, makes an argument for the vitality of Indigenous literatures and their ability to help make sense of our world. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018) is one-part literary exegesis, one-part memoir, and many parts radical text which calls for, among other things, broader human and non-human kinship, and the use of indigenous literatures to push back against settler colonial forms of erasure and oppression. Justice explores the vibrant universe of over two hundred years of literatures (written and non-written alike), from autobiography to spoken word poetry, to fantasy and wonderworks, in order to make the case that yes, of course indigenous literatures matter; they do so because indigenous people matter. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter thus acts as both indigenous literary bibliography and call to action to people of indigenous and non-indigenous backgrounds to read up and take notice of indigenous people speaking back to colonial power structures. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

On November 8, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction—the prelude to the Spanish seizure of Mexico City and to European colonization of the mainland of the Americas—has long been the symbol of Cortés’s bold and brilliant military genius. Montezuma, on the other hand, is remembered as a coward who gave away a vast empire and touched off a wave of colonial invasions across the hemisphere. But is this really what happened? Matthew Restall, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History at Pennsylvania State University and President of the American Society for Ethnohistory, departs from this traditional telling in his When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History (Ecco, 2018). Restall uses “the Meeting”—what he dubs their first encounter—as the entry point into a comprehensive reevaluation of both Cortés and Montezuma. Drawing on rare primary sources and overlooked accounts by conquistadors and Aztecs alike, Restall explores Cortés’s and Montezuma’s posthumous reputations, their achievements and failures, and the worlds in which they lived—leading, step by step, to a dramatic inversion of the old story. As Restall takes us through this sweeping, revisionist account of a pivotal moment in modern civilization, he calls into question our view of the history of the Americas, and, indeed, of history itself. Ryan Tripp teaches history at several community colleges, universities, and online extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

During his invasion of Creek Indian territory in 1813, future U.S. president Andrew Jackson discovered a Creek infant orphaned by his troops. Moved by an “unusual sympathy,” Jackson sent the child to be adopted into his Tennessee plantation household. Through the stories of nearly a dozen white adopters, adopted Indian children, and their Native parents, Dawn Peterson opens a window onto the forgotten history of adoption in early nineteenth-century America.  Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion (Harvard University Press, 2017) shows the important role that adoption played in efforts to subdue Native peoples in the name of nation-building. As the United States aggressively expanded into Indian territories between 1790 and 1830, government officials stressed the importance of assimilating Native peoples into what they styled the United States’ “national family.” White households who adopted Indians—especially slaveholding Southern planters influenced by leaders such as Jackson—saw themselves as part of this expansionist project. They hoped to inculcate in their young charges U.S. attitudes toward private property, patriarchal family, and racial hierarchy. U.S. whites were not the only ones driving this process. Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw families sought to place their sons in white households, to be educated in the ways of U.S. governance and political economy. But there were unintended consequences for all concerned. As adults, these adopted Indians used their educations to thwart U.S. federal claims to their homelands, setting the stage for the political struggles that would culminate in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Professor Martha Few’s For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (University of Arizona Press, 2015) describes the implementation of public health reforms in late eighteenth-century Guatemala and the diverse ways that indigenous communities engaged and resisted these programs.  Contrary to expectations, colonists were often ahead of administrators in Spain in adopting new medical methods, such as inoculating patients against smallpox.  But bringing these to rural communities, some with a significant degree of autonomy, required adaptation and compromise; and if resistance was stiff, medical officers reacted with the persecution of indigenous practices in ways that mirrored the church’s anti-idolatry purges.  By bringing Guatemala and its native residents into the networks of Atlantic medicine in the eighteenth century, For All Humanity illuminates the plurality of medical cultures that interacted in the production of the Enlightenment. Martha Few is Professor of Latin American History and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Mark Rifkin’s Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Duke University Press, 2017) engages fields including physics, phenomenology, native storytelling, and queer temporality. He describes the organization of Beyond Settler Time as “a series of meditations on particular kinds of temporal tensions—ways that Indigenous forms of time push against the imperatives of settler sovereignty” (ix). Exploring a range of sources including film, government documents, fiction, histories, and autobiography, Rifkin considers how time is defined by non-native ideologies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The American West has always been home to many deities, argues Jennifer Graber in The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (Oxford University Press, 2018). Graber, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Texas-Austin, tells the story of the Kiowa over the course of the long nineteenth century. For Kiowas, the continuation of well-established spiritual beliefs and practices sustained them in the face of great challenges, but at times these same elements were dynamic enough to change and adapt to fit new realities. Among the new realities were alliances with powerful neighbors such as the Comanche, with whom the Kiowa shared the Sun Dance ritual. Another was a growing rivalry and at times widespread bloodshed with Americans, whose Christian missionaries fought as much amongst themselves as they did for Native converts. Missionaries often operated under the guise of being “friends of the Indian,” even when their purposes were ultimately dispossession and cultural erasure. The Gods of Indian Country is a deep look at how one Native American society and their settler colonial conquerors  relied upon faith in the face of both success and failure, joy and sorrow, in a rapidly changing West. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In this sweeping new biography, Colin G. Calloway, John Kimball Jr. 1943 Professor of History and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, uses the prism of George Washington’s life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time—Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Red Jacket, Little Turtle—and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America’s founding. The Indian World of George Washington (Oxford University Press, 2018) spans decades of Native American leaders’ interactions with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands, to his military career against both the French and the British, to his presidency, when he dealt with Native Americans as a head of state would with a foreign power, using every means of diplomacy and persuasion to fulfill the new republic’s destiny by appropriating their land. By the end of his life, Washington knew more than anyone else in America about the frontier and its significance to the future of his country. The Indian World of George Washington offers a fresh portrait of the most revered American and the Native Americans whose story has been only partially told. Calloway’s biography invites us to look again at the history of America’s beginnings and see the country in a whole new light. Ryan Tripp teaches history at several community colleges, universities, and online extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), David J. Silverman argues that Indian societies adopted firearm technology not because they were visually impressive or culturally significant (though they were both), but simply because they killed more efficiently. Using his concept of the “gun frontier,” Silverman, a professor of history at George Washington University, shows how contact between Natives and those Europeans willing to trade weapons for furs and other goods fundamentally altered the politics and power dynamics of a given region. Thundersticks draws on case studies from a broad sweep of time from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century, including the consolidation of Iroquois power, King Philip’s War, the otter fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, and the ascendency of the Blackfeet in the mountain west. Each story underscores the point that guns could both undermine colonial power as well as cause catastrophic conflict between Indian societies. Firearms changed Indian societies in innumerable ways, but when the gun trade lagged, so too did an individual polity’s power. Silverman’s book is a complicated, nuanced, look at how post-contact North America has long been a wildly interconnected place, and how it became a continent filled with blood and smoke. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The ancient Maya are popularly known for their calendar, but their concept of time and the metaphysics surrounding that conception are not. In Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time (Lexington Books, 2018), Alexus McLeod reconstructs an ancient Mayan metaphysical system based on key texts and other artifacts plus using analogies with ancient Chinese philosophical thought. On his view, the Maya held that we can understand everything in temporal terms but that everything does not reduce to time, and that humans have a role in constructing manifest time and organizing the manifest world. McLeod, who is associate professor of philosophy and Asian studies at the University of Connecticut, also considers Mayan views of essences, truth, personal identity, and meaning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

“Native American” is unique among American racial categories in defining not just social status or historical lineage, but also an individual’s relationship to state and federal governments. In Who Belongs?: Race, Resources, and Tribal Citizenship in the Native South (Oxford University Press, 2016), Mikaela M. Adams, an assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi, tracks the histories of six Indian societies in the American South from the seventeenth to the twenty first centuries. In doing so, she argues that the question of belonging was often difficult to answer, particularly in a region where whites insisted on dividing the individuals along a strict, binary, color line. In Who Belongs?, Pamunkey, Catawba, Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Miccosukee communities all grapple with the fundamental question of tribal membership. After colonization and conquest, the answer to the question posed by Adams could have critical and concrete consequences. Often, whether someone belonged to a given tribe determined fundamental questions of identity, financial restitution, and land ownership. Who Belongs? is a critical retelling of the Native south which emphasizes the fungible nature of group identity and the adaptations Native communities made to survive within a settler colonial system of state power. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Not all city dwellers are bipedal, according to Frederick L. Brown, author of The City is More Than Human: An Animal History of Seattle (University of Washington Press, 2016). The history of Seattle, and all cities, is as much about its non-human inhabitants as its human ones, argues Brown, an independent scholar working on a contractual basis with the National Park Service. Salish-speaking people, the earliest inhabitants of the Puget Sound, had myriad relationships with animals. They thought of them as important symbols and as spiritual guides, and used them as a critical resource base. The species of animals living around the Puget Sound changed with European arrival and conquest, but the complicated relationships they had with humans did not. Cattle, horses, mountain lions, dogs, and salmon, all meant different things to different people at different times. Brown tracks these changes in use and attitude and argues that our perception of animals is shaped by the paradox of the pet food dish. The bowl we put out for our cats and dogs, Brown says, is an enduring symbol of our fraught relationship to creatures we by turns, eat, ignore, or love, depending on the context and the species in question. The history of the human city is indeed much more than a human history. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism (Oregon State University Press, 2017), Natchee Blu Barnd examines how Indigenous populations create space and geographies through naming, signage, cultural practices, and artistic expression within the confines of settler colonialism in the United States. Native Space explores these acts as everyday cultural practices, and also examines how settler societies deploy the concept of Indian-ness to create colonial geographies. Barnd takes an interdisciplinary approach toward these subjects, and examines these concepts through the use of demographic and cartographic data, stories, and imagery, each of which underscores the different methods Native peoples use to unsettle settler society and reclaim Indigenous spaces. Samantha M. Williams is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the history of the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada through the lenses of settler colonialism and public history. She can be reached at swillia7@ucsc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. In Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (Vintage, 2018) author and New Yorker staff writer David Grann (The Lost City of Z) narrates why and how, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history. ______________________________________________________________________________ Ryan Tripp is teaches history at several community colleges, universities, and online extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota and originally from Pine Ridge Reservation, has become one of the most important voices in the Indigenous foods revitalization movement. By researching in the archives, visiting elders, and experimenting with new uses for traditional ingredients and techniques, he has created a new vision for modern Native American cuisine. That vision is realized inThe Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Particularly making use of the traditional foods of Minnesotan tribal peoples, his company The Sioux Chef and the related non-profit North American Traditional Food Systems (NATIFS) have now released their first cookbook with the University of Minnesota Press, described as follows: “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.” James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Tore T. Petersen, Professor of International and American Diplomatic History at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, studies the final wars on the prairie from the Native American perspective in The Military Conquest of the Prairie: Native American Resistance, Evasion and Survival, 1865-1890 (Sussex Academic Press, 2016). When the reservation system took hold about one-third of tribes stayed permanently there, one-third during the harsh winter months, and the last third remained on what the government termed un-ceded territory, which Native Americans had the right to occupy by treaty. For the Federal government it was completely unacceptable that some Indians refused to submit to its authority. Both the Red River war (1874-75) in the south and the great Sioux war (1876-77) in the north were the direct result of Federal violation of treaties and agreements. At issue was the one-sided violence against free roaming tribes that were trying to maintain their old way of life, at the heart of which was avoidance on intermingling with white men. Contrary to the expectations of the government, and indeed to most historical accounts, the Native Americans were winning on the battlefields with clear conceptions of strategy and tactics. They only laid down their arms when their reservation was secured on their homeland, thus providing their preferred living space and enabling them to continue their way of life in security. But white-man perfidy and governmental double-cross were the order of the day. The Federal government found it intolerable that what it termed “savages” should be able to determine their own future. Vicious attacks were initiated in order to stamp out tribalism, resulting in driving the US aboriginal population almost to extinction. Analysis of these events is discussed in light of the passing of the Dawes Act in 1887 that provided for breaking up the reservations to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 that gave a semblance of justice to Native Americans. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Land is central in the construction of identity for many communities. For Ute Native Americans the meaning of a twelve million acre homeland in western Colorado is intricately linked to the various ways they understand their heritage and future. Brandi Denison, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at University of North Florida, narrates the history of this community’s removal, remembrance, and return to this land in Ute Land Religion in the American West, 1879-2009 (University of Nebraska Press, 2017). She argues that discourses about religion were essential to settler colonialism in the American West. These took shape through justifications for the displacement of Utes, in civilizing missionary projects, imagined nostalgia about pre-contact Colorado, and as a means for Ute to warrant inclusion and return. The category of religion was deployed in a variety of ways by natives and white settlers in order to establish, deny, exclude, and restore communities within the region. In our conversation we discuss the shift from notions of dirt to land, Ute engagement with the term religion, land and religious identity, Nathan Meeker and the 1879 conflict in the White River valley, Ute removal, sexual purity, morality and rape, Ute Land Religion in fiction and anthropology, the Meeker Massacre Pageant, the Smoking River Powwow, and attempts at reconciliation. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In his new book, Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, 1762-1803 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), David Narrett explores the international political and diplomatic competition for control of the Old Southwest. His book begins with the conclusion of the French and Indian War and follows the story until the Louisiana Purchase secured the area for the United States. It superbly illustrates the weak control exerted by Britain, France, and Spain over the Louisiana-Florida borderlands during the last half of the eighteenth century. It also highlights the fragile ties between Anglo-Americans in the region and the newly independent United States. In doing so, Narrett introduces a rogues’ gallery of schemers and adventurers who operated below the radar, ready to do whatever it took to further their private ends. He also ably covers the diplomatic machinations of imperial and American officials as they tried to make good their claims to lands between the southern Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. George Milne, the host of this podcast is an associate professor of history at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He specializes in Native American, Colonial, and Atlantic World history. His book Natchez Country, Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2015. You can contact him at milne@oakland.edu and follow him on Facebook at George.E.Milne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946 (Yale University Press, 2016), Katrina Jagodinsky recovers the stories too often presumed lost in the silences of colonial archives: those of Indigenous women operating within systems of American law. In doing so, she argues that Indigenous women in the American southwest and Pacific northwest used Indigenous epistemologies, legal codes, and community connections, to navigate American settler colonial legal regimes and in some cases emerging victorious. Jagodinsky, an Associate Professor in the history department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, uses unique methodologies combining traditional legal history, poetry, and non-written knowledge networks to recount the histories of six women from the border regions of what is today Arizona/Sonora and Washington/British Columbia. Legal Codes and Talking Trees shows how even under ardently white supremacist power structures and within settler colonial societies designed to dispossess Indigenous communities, people not only straddled racial lines individually, but also made families that run counter to easy narratives. Jagodinsky’s book is a call to arms for historians and archivists not to take their academic privilege for granted, and to use innovative research methods to locate and retell difficult to find stories, even when the archives may seem as incomprehensible as the language of the trees. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In 1758, Peter Williamson appeared on the streets of Aberdeen, Scotland, dressed as a Native American and telling a remarkable tale. He claimed that as a young boy he had been kidnapped from the city and sold into slavery in America. In performances and in a printed narrative he peddled to his audiences, Williamson described his tribulations as an indentured servant, Indian captive, soldier, and prisoner of war. Aberdeen’s magistrates called him a liar and banished him from the city, but Williamson defended his story. In Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain (Harvard University Press, 2018), Gettysburg College History Department Chair and Professor Timothy J. Shannon explains what Williamson’s tale says about how working people of eighteenth-century Britain, so often depicted as victims of empire, found ways to create lives and exploit opportunities within it. Exiled from Aberdeen, Williamson settled in Edinburgh, where he cultivated enduring celebrity as the self-proclaimed king of the Indians. His performances and publications capitalized on the curiosity the Seven Years’ War had ignited among the public for news and information about America and its native inhabitants. As a coffeehouse proprietor and printer, he gave audiences a plebeian perspective on Britain’s rise to imperial power in North America. Indian Captive, Indian King is a history of empire from the bottom up, showing how Williamson’s American odyssey illuminates the real-life experiences of everyday people on the margins of the British Empire and how those experiences, when repackaged in travel narratives and captivity tales, shaped popular perceptions about the empires racial and cultural geography. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In this interview, we discuss Andrew Frank‘s most recent book, Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami (University Press of Florida, 2017). The book is a concise and authoritative history of the region where modern-day Miami is located. Before the Pioneers, begins thousands of years in the past and places great emphasis on understanding the role that native people played in the history of south Florida. Borrowing extensively from archaeology, Before the Pioneers is a timely re-imaging of Miami’s history that places the native experience at the center of its narrative. Andrew Frank is the Allen Morris Professor of History at Florida State University. His primary research interest is the Native Southeast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other. Their duel triggered a war that capped a decades-long genocidal attack that was emblematic of the United States’ conquest of Native Americas peoples and lands. California author and editor Robert Aquinas McNally tells the wrenching story of this conflict in The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age (Bison Books, 2017). The 1872-73 Modoc War was one of the nation’s costliest campaigns against North American Indigenous peoples, in which the army placed nearly one thousand soldiers in the field against some fifty-five Modoc fighters. Although little known today, the Modoc War dominated national headlines for an entire year. Fought in south-central Oregon and northeastern California, the war settled into a siege in the desolate Lava Beds and climaxed the decades-long effort to dispossess and destroy the Modocs. The war did not end with the last shot fired, however. For the first and only time in U.S. history, Native fighters were tried and hanged for war crimes. The surviving Modocs were packed into cattle cars and shipped from Fort Klamath to the corrupt, disease-ridden Quapaw reservation in Oklahoma, where they found peace even more lethal than war. The Modoc War tells the forgotten story of a violent and bloody Gilded Age campaign at a time when the federal government boasted officially of a “peace policy” toward Indigenous nations. This compelling history illuminates a dark corner in our country’s past. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.       Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The story of the American West as it is often told typically involves Spanish, British, and American Empires struggling with Indigenous people for control of the vast territory lands and riches from the Mississippi to the Pacific. After the seventeenth century, French colonists and French-speaking Metis are often relegated to the role of bit players in this tale. Songs Upon the Rivers: The Buried History of the French-Speaking Canadiens and Metis From the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Across to the Pacific (Baraka Books, 2016) reemphasizes the importance of the French imperial legacy and Metis influence in the Great Lakes region, on the northern plains, and in the far Pacific West. In doing so, this book challenges American and Canadian narratives about the west which too often tend toward racial and national binaries. By telling the stories of people who lived across ethnic and national boundaries, Robert Foxcurran, Michel Bouchard, and Sebastien Mallett show how historians can use the complications of the past to explode notions of perceived difference in the present day, and in doing so reveal important stories about the Trans-Mississippi West which have been buried for far too long. Robert Foxcurran is an independent scholar and former historian for the Boeing Corporation, he can be reached at robert.r.foxcurran@gmail.com; Michel Bouchard is a Professor of anthropology at the University of Northern British Columbia; Sebastien Malette is an Assistant Professor in the Law and Legal Studies Department at Carleton University. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

It’s a sad story known well. In dead of winter at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, U.S. soldiers with the Seventh Cavalry Regiment gunned down over two hundred Lakota men, women, and children. Their crime? Taking part in the Ghost Dance ritual. What happened afterwards is a story told less often. David W. Grua, historian and editor with the Joseph Smith Papers project, tells about the competing memory and counter-memory of Wounded Knee as the U.S. Army first shaped the narrative, and later, Lakotas attempted to have their side of the story heard. In his Robert M. Utley Prize winning book, Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory (Oxford University Press, 2016), Grua argues that race, official memory, and public memorialization served the purposes of white supremacy on the northern Great Plains throughout much of the early twentieth century. Official army reports as well as physical memorialization at the massacre site spun a narrative of Indian savagery and white innocence that helped make the case for the twenty Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers who took part in the bloodshed. The truth was, of course, far more complicated, as Lakota activists like Joseph Horn Cloud would prove in an effort to gain restitution and justice from the American government. Surviving Wounded Knee is an important story about what happens to a massacre site once the smoke clears, and is a testament to the power of public history. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums (Oregon State University Press, 2017), Lisa King explores the ways in which rhetoric is used to represent Indigenous sovereignty and explore difficult histories related to colonialism and self-determination in museums and cultural centers. Her long-term, interdisciplinary study examines how exhibits related to these issues have evolved over a ten-year period at three different institutions: the Ziibiwing Center in Michigan, which is owned and operated by the Saginaw Chippewa tribe; the Haskell Indian Nation University’s Cultural Center and Museum, and the National Museum of the American Indian, which is part of the Smithsonian structure. Dr. King underscores the difficulties inherent in communicating these issues to diverse public audiences, as well as the need for consistent evaluation and reevaluation by these institutions to ensure both audience engagement and Indigenous self-representation. Samantha M. Williams is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the history of the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada through the lenses of settler colonialism and public history. She can be reached at swillia7@ucsc.edu.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In a meticulously researched study The Specter of the Indian: Race, Gender and Ghosts in American Seances, 1848-1890 (SUNY Press, 2017), Kathryn Troy investigates the many examples of Indian ghosts appearing to Spiritualists in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The book explores non-judgmentally the ways in which these ghosts motivated their mediums and other Spiritualists to engage with the rights of living Native Americans. James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law and History at Vanderbilt University, narrates a postbellum struggle that raged in the Northern Rockies in Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War (W.W. Norton and Company, 2017). In the summer of 1877, General Oliver Otis Howard, a champion of African American civil rights during Reconstruction, ruthlessly pursued hundreds of Nez Perce families who resisted moving onto a reservation. Standing in his way was Chief Joseph, a young leader who never stopped advocating for Native American sovereignty and equal rights. Thunder in the Mountains is the spellbinding story of two legendary figures and their epic clash of ideas about the meaning of freedom and the role of government in American life. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Lisa Brooks, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College, recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance in Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale University Press, 2018). Brooks narrates the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks’s pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research, but in the land and communities of Native New England, illuminating the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history. Readers can also participate in a remapping of the “First Indian War,” later renamed “King Philip’s War.” Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Onigamiising is the Ojibwemowin word for Duluth and the surrounding area. In this book of fifty warm, wise and witty essays, Linda LeGarde Grover tells the story of the four seasons of life, from Ziigwan (Spring) to Biboon (Winter), using episodes from her own life as illustrations of the central Anishinaabe concept of mino bimaadiziwin (To live a good life). Educational in the most profound sense, these essays in Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) range back and forth between ceremony and tradition, intergenerational trauma and revitalization, domestic pleasures and feasts, and a life well lived. James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Sovereignty is a key concept in Native American and Indigenous Studies, but its also a term that is understood in multiple ways. Working across the boundaries of legal and literary theory, David J. Carlson‘s Imagining Sovereignty: Self-Determination in American Indian Law and Literature (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016) examines the works, both creative and theoretical, of many Native intellectuals who have considered sovereignty in the past century. Sovereignty emerges in this study as a necessarily imprecise concept that mediates between indigenous communities and also with the settler colonial government of the United States. Carlson discusses thinkers who have previously been seen as opposed, showing ways that their disparate projects can in fact be seen via the idea of self-determination as in many ways complementary. James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

With the end of the Civil War, George Crook’s decision to continue serving in the United States Army meant reverting to a lower rank and assuming a command in the Pacific Northwest. Yet, as Paul Magid details in the second volume of his biography of Crook, The Gray Fox: George Crook and the Indian Wars (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), he would soon emerge as one of the most prominent figures in the army’s ongoing operations against Native Americans in the territories. In describing Crook’s campaign against the Paiutes in the Great Basin, Magid details the relentless attritional warfare that was a hallmark of his strategy against the tribes he fought. Results in the Northwest led to his transfer to Arizona, where his success against the Apache and Yavapai earned him a promotion to the rank of brigadier general. With his selection as the head of the Department of the Platte in 1875, Crook found himself coping with the deteriorating situation in the Dakota Territory created by the surge of prospectors and settlers, and with the outbreak of the war against the Sioux, the general took to the field in a series of grueling campaigns. Though suffering a setback at the battle of Rosebud, Crook’s subsequent victory at Slim Buttes led to the subjugation of the Sioux and the surrender of Crazy Horse, which cemented Crook’s reputation as the army’s leading expert in Indian warfare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

James F. Brooks, UC Santa Barbara Professor of History and Anthropology and the William S. Vaughn Visiting Fellow at Vanderbilt University’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, offers a scrupulously researched investigation of the mysterious massacre of Hopi Indians at Awat’ovi as well as the event’s echo through American history in Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat’ovi Massacre (W.W. Norton & Company, 2016). The Hopi community of Awat’ovi existed peacefully on Arizona’s Antelope Mesa for generations until one bleak morning in the fall of 1700—raiders from nearby Hopi villages descended on Awat’ovi, slaughtering their neighboring men, women, and children. While little of the pueblo itself remains, five centuries of history lie beneath the low rises of sandstone masonry, and theories about the events of that night are as persistent as the desert winds. The easternmost town on Antelope Mesa, Awat’ovi was renowned for its martial strength, and had been the gateway to the entire Hopi landscape for centuries. Why did kinsmen target it for destruction? Drawing on oral traditions, archival accounts, and extensive archaeological research, James Brooks unravels the story and its significance. Mesa of Sorrows follows the pattern of an archaeological expedition, uncovering layer after layer of evidence and theories. Brooks questions their reliability and shows how interpretations were shaped by academic, religious and tribal politics. Piecing together three centuries of investigation, he offers insight into why some were spared—women, mostly, and taken captive—and others sacrificed. He weighs theories that the attack was in retribution for Awat’ovi having welcomed Franciscan missionaries or for the residents’ practice of sorcery, and argues that a perfect storm of internal and external crises revitalized an ancient cycle of ritual bloodshed and purification. A haunting account of a shocking massacre, Mesa of Sorrows is a probing exploration of how societies confront painful histories, and why communal violence still plagues us today. A French edition of of the book, Awat’ovi : l’histoire et les fantomes du passe en pays Hopi, is forthcoming. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Native American students from across the United States attended federally-managed boarding schools where they were taught English, math, and a variety of vocational skills, all for the purpose of forcing their assimilation into white, American society. While enrolled at these schools, students also showcased their writing, editing, and printing skills by publishing school newspapers. In Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Assistant Professor of English Jacqueline Emery provides the first comprehensive collection of Native American writings published in boarding school newspapers, and demonstrates the ways in which students used these periodicals to both challenge and reflect assimilationist practices at the schools. The collection includes student-authored letters, editorials, fiction, and folklore, and examines the writings of Gertrude Bonin, Charles Eastman, and Luther Standing Bear, among additional, lesser-known writers. Samantha M. Williams is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the history of the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada through the lenses of settler colonialism and public history. She can be reached at swillia7@ucsc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), Laura E. Smith, Assistant Professor of Art History at Michigan State University, unravels the compelling life story of Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw (1906-84), one of the first professional Native American photographers. Born on the Kiowa reservation in Anadarko, Oklahoma, Poolaw bought his first camera at the age of fifteen and began taking photos of family, friends, and noted leaders in the Kiowa community, also capturing successive years of powwows and pageants at various fairs, expositions, and other events. Though Poolaw earned some income as a professional photographer, he farmed, raised livestock, and took other jobs to help fund his passion for documenting his community. Smith examines the cultural and artistic significance of Poolaw’s life in professional photography from 1925 to 1945 in light of European and modernist discourses on photography, portraiture, the function of art, Native American identity, and American Indian religious and political activism. Rather than through the lens of Native people’s inevitable extinction or within a discourse of artistic modernism, Smith evaluates Poolaw’s photography within art history and Native American history, simultaneously questioning the category of fine artist in relation to the creative lives of Native peoples. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (Oxford University Press, 2017), Princeton University English Associate Professor Sarah Rivett studies how colonists in North America struggled to understand, translate, and interpret Native American languages, and the significance of these languages for theological and cosmological issues such as the origins of Amerindian populations, their relationship to Eurasian and Biblical peoples, and the origins of language itself. Through a close analysis of previously overlooked texts, Unscripted America places American Indian languages within transatlantic intellectual history, while also demonstrating how American letters emerged in the 1810s through 1830s via a complex and hitherto unexplored engagement with the legacies and aesthetic possibilities of indigenous words. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Claiming Turtle Mountain’s Constitution: The History, Legacy, and Future of a Tribal Nation’s Founding Documents (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Turtle Mountain Tribal Court Associate Justice and UNC-Chapel Hill American Studies Assistant ProfessorKeith Richotte, Jr., offers a critical examination of one tribal nation’s decision to adopt a constitution. In an auditorium in Belcourt, North Dakota, on a chilly October day in 1932, Robert Bruce and his fellow tribal citizens held the political fate of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in their hands. Bruce, and the others, had been asked to adopt a tribal constitution, but he was unhappy with the document, as it limited tribal governmental authority. However, white authorities told the tribal nation that the proposed constitution was a necessary step in bringing a lawsuit against the federal government over a long-standing land dispute. Bruce’s choice, and the choice of his fellow citizens, has shaped tribal governance on the reservation ever since that fateful day. By asking why the citizens of Turtle Mountain voted to adopt the document despite perceived flaws, he confronts assumptions about how tribal constitutions came to be, reexamines the status of tribal governments in the present, and offers a fresh set of questions as we look to the future of governance in Native America and beyond. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

John Ryan Fischer‘s book Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) is a fascinating look at how a common animal—the cow—changed the landscapes, economies and peoples of both California and Hawai’i, and linked them together in unexpected ways, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. After the introduction of cattle into each of these societies by Europeans, not only did the cows bring ecological change, but they fundamentally altered how people lived, worked, earned their living and interacted with the world at large. As California’s and Hawai’i’s economies became increasingly focused on cattle, especially the hide and tallow industries in the 1820s and 30s, the changes both in the land and the people who worked it paved the way for broader colonial projects both by European countries and eventually the United States. Ryan Fischer is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. He specializes in environmental history, and studied under environmental and Early American history heavyweights Louis Warren and Alan Taylor at University of California Davis, which has one of the best environmental history programs in the nation. Sean Munger is an author, historian, teacher and podcaster.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Through meticulous archival research, close readings of key works, and informed and imaginative speculation about a largely enigmatic life, Red Ink author Drew Lopenzina provides a vivid portrait of a singular Native American figure in Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017). This “cultural biography” provides a lens through which to comprehend the complex dynamics of indigenous survival and resistance in the era of America’s early nationhood. William Apess’s life intersects with multiple aspects of indigenous identity and existence in this period, including indentured servitude, slavery, service in the armed forces, syncretic engagements with Methodist spirituality, and Native struggles for political and cultural autonomy. Even more, Apess offers a powerful and provocative voice for the persistence of Native American presence in a time and place that was long supposed to have settled its Indian question in favor of extinction. This new biography will sit alongside Apess’s own writing as vital reading for those interested in early America and indigeneity. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Between 1902 and 1934, hundreds of Native American men, women, and children were institutionalized at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians; only nine of them, however, were officially committed by court order. In Vanished in Hiawatha: The Story of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), independent scholar Carla Joinson examines the history of the only insane asylum in United States history dedicated solely to the institutionalization of Native Americans. Vanished in Hiawatha further connects the establishment of the Canton Asylum with efforts to assimilate Indigenous populations during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and considers how and why the institution remained open for three decades, given the ongoing mismanagement and mistreatment of Native patients at the facility. Samantha M. Williams is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the history of the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada through the lenses of settler colonialism and public history. She can be reached at swillia7@ucsc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Rebecca Fraser is a writer, journalist, and broadcaster whose work has been published in Tatler, Vogue, The Times, and The Spectator. President of the Bronte Society for many years, she is the author of a biography of Charlotte Bronte that examines her life in the context of contemporary attitudes about women. Her last book was The Story of Britain, a single-volume history of how England was governed over the past 2000 years. Now, just in time for Thanksgiving, comes her new book, The Mayflower: The Families, the Voyage, and the Founding of America (St. Martin’s Press 2017). It tells the story of the Plymouth colony by focusing on the adventures and trials of Edward Winslow, who sailed over on the Mayflower in 1620, and then his son Josiah, who played a crucial role in the growing wars with the American Indians in the late 1670s. Over the course of the hour, we talk about how Edward, a largely ignored protagonist of America’s founding story, was foundational to maintaining early relationships with the Indians (including for the exchange of food for the ‘first’ Thanksgiving). Fraser talks about how Edward’s ideal of community, and Plymouth’s more ‘tolerant’ society compared to the Massachusetts Bay Colony to its north, was troubled by the influx of new colonists, the consolidation of colonial governance in the region, patriarchal power grabs, and the re-entrenchment of religious orthodoxies. Both in our discussion and in the book—a dramatic, highly detailed narrative of promise and nightmarish turns—Fraser adds much nuance to the emotional, psychological, and material complexities of the early colonists conflicted lives. We dive into Edward’s interest in and writing of ethnographical accounts, particularly of the Indians, as well as the place of women in the Plymouth story. Fraser reveals the wry perspectives women take on the men in their lives as we come to feel the effects of deaths, fluctuating fortunes, the formations of new churches, and the dangers of giving birth on the structure of life. The particularly adventurous energy, and personality, of Edward Winslow, and his less curious son’s re-assertion of an English identity, are the engines of the story. Their paths afford a new view of both the intercultural relationships and negotiations that kept the nascent country alive, and their eventual dismissal by the next generation. The result is a war with the Indians that would forever change the story. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at mjamico@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Jeffrey H. Cohen, a professor at The Ohio State University, has managed a rare feat: placing anthropology classics like Argonauts of the Western Pacific in the context of eating grasshoppers. His impressively readable Eating Soup without a Spoon: Anthropological Theory and Method in the Real World (University of Texas Press, 2015) is a retrospective on his first foray into the field, but it does a fair bit more than that. While recounting his own experiences in Oaxaca, Mexico, Cohen provides insight into how theory can be applied to the real world. The book transitions between high-level analysis of social relations in his adopted community and the harsh truths of working with human beings in less-than-comfortable settings. The result is a fun and interesting read, well-suited to undergraduate courses on introductory anthropology and field methods. Jared Miracle is an anthropologist and folklorist whose research areas include violence, education, and digital culture. He is the author of Now with Kung Fu Grip! How Bodybuilders, Soldiers and Hairdresser Reinvented Martial Arts for America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In less than thirty years, California’s Indian population fell from 150,000 to 30,000. In An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (Yale University Press, 2016), Benjamin Madley, Associate Professor of History at UCLA, argues that war or disease can’t explain this population drop. The state and federal government carried out genocide against California Indians between 1846 and 1873. Madley uncovers, in excruciating detail, how government officials created a killing machine that cost at least $1,700,000. An American Genocide has won many awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide, the Charles Redd Phi Alpha Theta Award for the Best Book on the American West, the California Book Award’s Gold Medal for California, and the Heyday Books History Award. The book was also named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, an Indian Country Today Hot List book, and a Choice magazine Outstanding Academic Title. True West Magazine also named Madley the Best New Western Author of 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Douglas Hunter examines the history of meanings, affinities, and petroglyph studies of Dighton Rock. First noticed by colonists in 1680, by the nineteenth century Massachusetts’ Dighton Rock was one of the most famous and contested artifacts of American antiquity. This forty-two ton boulder covered in petroglyphs has been the subject of endless speculation denying its Native American origins. Interpretations have included Vikings, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Lost Tribes of Israel, visitors from Atlantis, ancient Freemasons, and (today) the lost Portuguese explorer, Miguel Corte-Real. Hunter dissects almost four centuries of Dighton Rock’s misinterpretations to reveal its larger role in the colonization and the conceptualization of Native Americans. This sprawling study brings a fresh perspective to scientific racism, the rise of American archaeology and anthropology, the intellectual weaponry of colonialism, and the construction of migration theories for the peopling of the Americas. By disenfranchising Native Americans from their own past in interpretations of Dighton Rock and related archaeological puzzles such as the Mound Builders, colonizers have sought to answer to their own advantage two fundamental questions: to whom does America belong, and who belongs in America? Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In the summer of 1885, the Lakota Sioux holy man Sitting Bull toured North America as a member of Buffalo Bill Cody’s famous “Wild West” show. His participation, as Deanne Stillman explains in her book Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill (Simon & Schuster, 2017) linked two celebrities of Gilded Age America into an association that would endure for long afterward. Both men were legends of the American West–Cody for his service as a scout and prowess in killing bison, Sitting Bull for his role as a leader and his association with the Battle of Little Bighorn. Taking advantage of Sitting Bull’s relationship with Annie Oakley, another star performer in his show, Cody succeeded in enlisting his involvement, where he proved a popular draw. Though Sitting Bull’s time with the show was brief, he formed a bond with Cody deep enough to lead Cody to cross the country five years later in an unsuccessful effort to intervene in the events that led to Sitting Bull’s death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

America’s national experience and collective history have always been subject to transnational forces and affected by global events and conditions. In recognition of this reality, the textbook Global Americans: A History of the United States (Cengage, 2017) presents a history of North America and then the United States in which world events and processes are central rather than colorful sidelights. In doing so, the text reflects the diverse experiences of the students it speaks to, as well as their families. Readers will be immersed in an accessible and inclusive American history in which a variety of social, cultural, economic, and geographic dynamics play key roles. The authors want you to see yourselves in the narrative, primary source documents, images, and other media they have assembled. Global Americans reveals the long history of global events that have shaped — and been shaped by — the peoples who have come to constitute the United States. In this podcast Maria Montoya discusses the story behind the creation and necessity of this textbook, what it hopes to accomplish in classrooms, and the opportunities and challenges of collaborative writing. Maria E. Montoya earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1993 and her BA from Yale in 1986. She is an Associate Professor of History New York University, as well as the Dean of Arts and Science at New York University, Shanghai. She is the author of numerous articles as well as the book Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840-1900. She has also worked on the AP U.S. History Development Committee and consulted to the College Board. Lori A. Flores is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale, 2016). She is based in Brooklyn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In an activist application of her scholarly discipline, Dr Liz Conor’s Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women (UWA Publishing, 2016) acknowledges its dual potential to disturb and to incite a reckoning – giving life to Audre Lorde’s famous quote that the learning process is something to be incited, like a riot. Using travelogues, cartoon strips, missionary diaries, paintings and lithographs, just to name a few, Dr. Conor’s consultation of a vast colonial archive challenges the amnesia in our national record and, accordingly, the racism and misogyny of our cultural imaginary. Recreating the settler-colonial imaginary and the tropes and stereotypes it projected in the imperial enterprise of knowledge production about Aboriginal women, Skin Deep exposes the interlocking oppressions of gender and race that manifested in the 18th, 19th and 20th century. From the innocent native-belle, to the beaten captive bride, the cannibalistic mother to the bare-footed domestic worker, the sexualised metonym of the virginal land to the unsightly, malevolent matriarch, the Aboriginal women was reduced by the settler to a canvas – recklessly painted with the ideologies, expectations and ambitions of the empire – making the Aboriginal women devastatingly skin-deep. Taylor Fox-Smith is teaching gender studies at Macquarie University and researching the gender gap in political behaviour and psychology at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia. Having received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with first class Honours in American Studies at the University of Sydney, Taylor was awarded the American Studies Best Thesis Award for her work titled The Lemonade Nexus. The thesis uses the theme of marital infidelity in Beyonce’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as a popular cultural narrative of institutional betrayal, and parallels it with police brutality in Baltimore city. It argues that the album provides an alternative model of political formation which can help to understand redemption in the wake of an urban uprising. Rewriting the traditional protest to politics narrative with an iterative nexus named after the album, Taylor’s research continues to straddle political science, gender studies and popular culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The intersection of colonialism and mass atrocities is one of the most exciting insights of the past years of genocide studies. But most people don’t really think of the Soviet Union and the American west as colonial spaces. But while there are limitations to this, both fit well into a kind of geography of colonialism. This is why Edward Westermann‘s new book Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016)is so interesting. Westermann teaches at Texas A & M University at San Antonio. Prior to this work, he wrote a well-regarded volume on the German police battalions on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Before joining the university world, he was an officer in the US military, and he brings his training and experience to a study of the strategy and tactics of the armies which fought in each space. In doing so, he sheds new light on how each army behaved. He’s particularly good at understanding how tactics and military culture drove the American army to act in ways that killed women and children without that being their goal. But he’s also good at analyzing the broader cultural climate that informed policy makers in each society. His discussion of the regional splits in policy toward American Indians was noteworthy. It’s a book that made me think about the American west in a new light. Kelly McFall is Associate Professor of History at Newman University in Wichita Kansas, where he directs the Honors Program. He is particularly interested in the question of how to teach about the history of genocides and mass atrocities and has written a module in the Reacting to the Past series about the UN debate over whether to intervene in Rwanda in 1994. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Clyde Warrior was a Ponca Indian who in the 1960s was one of the founders of the “Red Power” movement for the rights of Native Americans. While his name may not be as well-known as that of other civil rights leaders of that decade, as Paul McKenzie-Jones reveals in this biography Clyde Warrior: Tradition, Community, and Red Power (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), he was as just as pivotal a figure as many such figures who are household names today. Growing up on his grandparents farm in Oklahoma, Warrior was immersed in Ponca culture and became renowned for his prowess in the Fancy Dance competitions in the postwar Southwest. In college he embraced student activism, and went from participation in Indian student groups to the establishment of the National Indian Youth Council in 1961. As an advocate of self-determination, he was soon at the forefront of the movement for greater Native American rights, even coining the phrase Red Power in 1966 to encapsulate his goals. As McKenzie-Jones demonstrates, Warriors premature death cut short his promising career but left a legacy that would be carried on by others in the decades that followed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Coll Thrush’s new book is an imaginative and beautifully-written history of London framed by the experiences of indigenous travelers since early modernity. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016) brings together urban and indigenous histories, arguing that indigenous people around the world have actively engaged with and helped create the world we call modern, including its great urban centers. The book is organized around domains of entanglement, with each chapter following a particular set of travelers to explore a particular way that urban and Indigenous histories are linked: knowledge, disorder, reason, ritual, discipline, memory. Interspersed with these chapters are free-verse poetical interludes that weave archival fragments and Thrush’s own writerly voice together in stories of particular objects that mark the book’s journey: a mirror, a debtors’ petition, a pair of statues, a lost museum, a hat factory, a notebook. It is a thoughtful, compelling account that will be of interest to a wide range of readers interested in indigenous studies, urban history, early modern history, and London itself. An appendix on Self-Guided Encounters with Indigenous London helps readers use the book as a kind of travel guide to help activate the history of Indigenous London into shaping explorations of the city today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Scholars have long treated cities as spaces in which indigenous people have little presence and less significance. This notion that urbanity and indignity stand at odds results from a potent mix of racist essentialism and the historical myth of progress from savagery to civilization. Just as this paradigm excludes native peoples from the City, it excludes them from modernity. Perhaps no city expresses this erasure of Indigenous bodies, minds, and histories so effectively as London, the capital of the British Empire. Yet as Dr. Coll Thrush demonstrates in his new book Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016), beneath this erasure lie centuries of indigenous experience. In his hands London becomes not merely the Heart of Empire but the periphery of a richly textured indigenous diaspora, a Red Atlantic. Dr. Thrush ambitiously recasts five centuries of London’s history through the lived experiences of native visitors from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. These travelers were royal statesmen and diplomats, missionaries and athletes. They came to further the complex interests of their own Nations. They critiqued the metropolis’s excess, its ecological unsustainability, and its inhumanity towards the poor. In doing so, they participated in creating London’s present. Their impact remains in London’s material culture and its understanding of its own urban and suburban realities. Join us as Dr. Thrush invites us into an Indigenous London that is not so much hidden as deliberately silenced, and which courses throughout the fabric of the modern city. Jeremy Wood is a Seattle attorney. Much of his legal and scholarly work has concerned Native American interests. Additionally he serves as a Human Rights Commissioner for the City of Seattle and teaches Jewish literature to middle and high school students in an after school program. You can find out more about his work by visiting https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfwood. He can be reach at jeremywood10@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Kelly Watson’s Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World (New York University Press, 2015) explores the history of the New World through the lens of the cannibal myth. Watson establishes that accusations of cannibalism in the Americas during the early modern period became a valuable discursive tool to justify the European imperial project. She shows how early accounts of crazed cannibal women grounded the often discordant voices of Spanish explorers, colonial officials, and clergy into one persuasive call for action in the Caribbean and Mexico. Watson shows how Spanish accounts followed similar calls for action against cannibals in ancient and medieval texts echoing the writings of Pliny and Herodotus. Although these claims were often exaggerated or fabricated, the cannibal myth became a kind of prehistory essential for the atrocities and enslavement of native peoples of the Americas. French and English colonists also employed the cannibal myth for their own interests. Watson shows how French Jesuit missionaries used the spectre of native cannibalism as a means to amplify their own sense of Christian martyrdom in Quebec. The English too used captivity narratives to reinforce their claim to North American lands as a something that was once wild and savage now made civilized through great diligence and personal risk. In all contexts, the cannibal myth identified and enhanced the masculine identities of the colonizers, enhancing a claim to subjectivity, justice, and reason to the perceived chaos of effeminized native peoples. James Esposito is a historian and researcher interested in digital history, empire, and the history of technology. James can be reached via email at espositojamesj@gmail.com and on Twitter @james_esposito_ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The West, particularly the mountain West of states like Colorado, Utah, Idaho, has long had an image as a land of white men. This image dates to the 19th century, yet it is counterintuitive. Before it became a white man’s paradise, the West was the land of Native Americans, immigrants, Hispanics, and even occasionally free blacks. In his new book, Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West (University Press of Colorado, 2016), Jason Pierce (Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University) examines this transformation. Initially, the West was treated as a space to send the others of society, including primarily non-whites, in order to keep the Eastern United States more racially pure. Yet, when gold was discovered and the West became a desirable location for white inhabitants, the image had to be remade. Pierce examines how this was done and how the image of the West continued to be contested. He also discusses how violence helped disempower the non-white inhabitants of the region and render their continued presence less threatening to the idea of a white man’s country. In this episode of the podcast, Pierce discusses the book and his key findings about this process. He discusses how he got interested in the region as a native Coloradan. He explains why this transformation occurred and how some of the interesting figures worked hard to remake the West’s image. He also discusses serendipitous moments in the research process and the present and future racial image of the region. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

I grew up in Michigan, in the United States, where I was surrounded by places named with Native American names. I drove to Saginaw to play in basketball tournaments and to Pontiac to watch an NBA team play. Now in Kansas, I live near towns called Kiowa and Cherokee. But for much of my life, despite my profession as an historian, names like these were just background noise in the everyday reality of my life, not reminders of the fact that Native Americans have lived in and with the presence of settlers for centuries. Andrew Woolford has done much to help me recognize and understand this. Woolford is one of the preeminent scholars on the relationship between “natives” and settlers in the United States and Canada. He is also one of the most thoughtful voices in considering whether this relationship should be called genocidal. In my discussion with him, we tried to get at the essence of his ideas by looking at three of his works. We begin with the volume of essays he co-edited with Alexander Hinton and Jeff Benvenuto, titled Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America. The book collects the contributions of a variety of authors researching the issue. The essays generally offer focused examinations of specific issues of events. But the editors also offer valuable reflections on what we know and don’t know about the subject. It’s an outstanding resource for people interested in the question broadly. We then move on to Woolford’s own work, titled This Benevolent Experiment:Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (University of Nebraska Press, 2015).The book is a wonderful examination of the Indigenous school systems in Canada and the United States in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Woolford extracts from his research a wonderful new metaphor to illustrate the way in which genocide worked in North America, one that has much broader utility in the field. And he offers a careful, well-reasoned explanation for why he thinks genocide is indeed the most appropriate term for the cultural and physical violent that characterized the period. Both books are excellent. Finally, while we didn’t have much time to address it specifically, Woolford edited a recent special edition of the Journal of Genocide Research focusing on the topic. It’s also a rich source of information and insight. Put together, the three works offer perhaps the best way into the growing field of genocide studies in North America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Harvard University Press, 2016) maps the intricate, intersecting channels of information exchange in the early American South, exploring how people in the colonial world came into possession of vital knowledge in a region that lacked a regular mail system or a printing press until the 1730s. Challenging the notion of early colonial America as an uninformed backwater, Alejandra Dubcovsky uncovers the ingenious ways its inhabitants acquired timely news through largely oral networks. Information circulated through the region via spies, scouts, traders, missionaries, and other ad hoc couriers and by encounters of sheer chance with hunting parties, shipwrecked sailors, captured soldiers, or fugitive slaves. For many, content was often inseparable from the paths taken and the alliances involved in acquiring it. The different and innovative ways that Indians, Africans, and Europeans struggled to make sense of their world created communication networks that linked together peoples who otherwise shared no consensus of the physical and political boundaries shaping their lives. Exchanging information was not simply about having the most up-to-date news or the quickest messenger. It was a way of establishing and maintaining relationships, of articulating values and enforcing prioritiesa process inextricably tied to the regions social and geopolitical realities. At the heart of Dubcovskys study are important lessons about the nexus of information and power in the early American South. Andrew Bard Epstein is a graduate teacher and researcher at Yale University. Follow him on twitter @andeps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Heather Miyano Kopelson explores how religion, primarily expressed through bodily action, contributed to colonial notions of difference in her recent book Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (NYU Press, 2014). She examines the religious rituals of Taíno, Algonquian, and West African peoples in the New World, and how they intersected with Puritan theology and expression. By comparing these interactions in both New England and Bermuda, she demonstrates how divergent attitudes toward race could be, even among like-minded colonists. Her book demonstrates the centrality of religious attitudes in Puritans’ changing conceptions of colonized bodies, and therefore how racial ideologies developed in two radically different imperial outposts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

On November 11, 2015, leaders and citizens of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy–Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk and Tuscarora–will gather in the small lakeside city of Canandaigua, New York to commemorate the 221st anniversary of a monumental treaty. Negotiated between the Confederacy and representatives of new federal government in the autumn of 1794, the Treaty of Canandaigua recognized the sovereign status of the Six Nations as separate polities with the right to the “free use and enjoyment” of their lands. While state and private actors would soon violate the accord, seizing ever more Haudenosaunee territory, the Canandaigua Treaty remains a binding expression of “peace and friendship” between the the Confederacy (commonly known as the Iroquois) and the United States. Michael L. Oberg tells this remarkable story of intercultural diplomacy in Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 (Oxford University Press, 2015). Distinguished Professor of History at SUNY-Geneseo, Oberg narrates the twists and turns of war, dispossession, and resilience that brought sixteen hundred Haudenosaunee delegates, including Red Jacket, Cornplanter, and Handsome Lake, to a council with Colonel Timothy Pickering, an official representative of President George Washington. “Brother, we the Sachems of the Six Nations will now tell our minds,” Red Jacket declared in 1794. “The business of this treaty is to brighten the Chain of Friendship between us and the fifteen fires.” The Haudenosaunee continue that effort today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Owning property. Being property. Becoming propertyless. These are three themes of white possession that structure Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s brilliant new inquiry into the dynamics of race and Indigeneity in “postcolonizing” societies like Australia.The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) collects and expands over a decade of work that speaks to key dynamics both at the heart, and sometimes obscured, within critical Indigenous studies. A Goenpul scholar from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay) in Queensland, Australia, Aileen Moreton-Robinson is the author of numerous previous books and articles in the fields of law and sovereignty, whiteness, race and feminism, and is a Council Member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

13,000-years ago, the people of the first identifiable culture in North America were hunting mammoth and mastodon, bison, and anything else they could launch their darts and spears at, and undoubtedly, most assuredly, they themselves were being hunted by gigantic short-faced bears, America lions and saber-toothed cats. Thus, in order to survive life in the Pleistocene, Clovis people developed a sophisticated tool and weapon technology. Clovis Technology (International Monographs in Prehistory, 2010) describes it in a step by step, easy to understand way using simple, common-sense terms with photos and drawings that makes a complex subject an absolute joy to read. Three (3) Paleoindian specialists, Bruce Bradley, Michael Collins and Andrew Hemmings, (with important contributions by Marilyn Shoberg, and Jon Lohse) have written a “must have” book for anyone interested in lithic, bone or ivory analysis, not just Clovis technology. The interview with Andrew Hemmings goes deep into the weeds of Clovis Technology and discusses new discoveries and information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In this episode of New Books in Archaeology we talk with Douglas B. Bamforth about his new book The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska (University of New Mexico Press, 2015). Bamforth focuses primarily on Paleoindian land use represented by the Allen Site and the adjacent smaller sites... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

When Howard Zinn published A People’s History of the United States in 1980, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was thrilled. “I used it as a text immediately,” she remembers. Comrades in the movement anti-war movement, Zinn and Dunbar-Ortiz shared a belief that a radically different kind of history, freed from patriotic bluster, was desperately needed. But Dunbar-Ortiz was also concerned by Zinn’s narrative. While the opening chapters on the genocide of Indigenous people were “like no other general U.S. history book,” Native Americans largely fell out of the story until the Red Power movements of the 1960s and 70s. “I kept saying to Howard, ‘What happened to the Indians? Why did they disappear until Alcatraz in 1969?'” Dunbar-Ortiz recounts. “He would say, ‘You have to write that book.'” And so last year, Dunbar-Ortiz published An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2014). Covering several centuries in a brisk and moving narrative, this is a deeply unsettling tale. Dunbar-Ortiz lays bear a process of genocidal colonization and Indigenous resistance, the genesis of a American way of war born from frontier counterinsurgency and premised on annihilation, and how powerful origin myths continue to obscure the real history of this continent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In his new book Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the ‘Good Indian’ (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), Michael Ray FitzGerald reviews how television represented Native Americans, including in both positive and negative stereotypes. He talks about these portrayals from early television shows to more recent characterizations.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

For as long as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick has been a staple of the American literary canon, one element often goes unnoticed. The ship commanded by the monomanacial Ahab on his quest to slay the great white whale is named the Pequod, just one letter of difference from Pequot, a Native nation living within what is now southern New England. Perhaps Mellville was just participating in the widespread romantic nostalgia of the age, when many corporate enterprises and vessels took the name of the supposedly disappearing and noble Indians. Or, maybe he was simply gesturing at the reality of the industry. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when Moby Dick takes place, Native men from New England constituted a huge portion of the whaling workforce, some spending decades at sea, encountering diverse peoples across two oceans, and invigorating their economically marginalized reservations with vital income. These forgotten seamen finally have a chronicler in Nancy Shoemaker, professor of history at the University of Connecticut. Author or editor of seven books, her latest is Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Last month, VICE NEWS released a short documentary about the Navajo Nation called “Cursed by Coal.” The images and stories confirm the title. “Seems like everything’s just dying out here,” says Navajo citizen Joe Allen. “It’s because of the mine. Everything is being ruined. They don’t care about people living on that land.” About four hundred miles southwest of the Four Corners Power Plant, where much of the coal stripped from Navajo land is burned for energy, stands the gleaming Chase Tower in downtown Phoenix, the tallest building in the state of Arizona. Connecting the two places is a maze of energy infrastructure, hidden and ignored when a Chase executive enters his air-conditioned top-floor office. “Electricity and power lines had become second nature in Phoenix, as assumed and expected aspect of modern life,” writes Andrew Needham. “Appearing in Phoenix’s homes, businesses, and factories at the flick of a switch, electricity seemed to exist in neither time nor space. It simply was.” But it had to be made somewhere, as Needham vividly illustrates in his new book, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton University Press, 2014). With booming desert cities demanding ever more power throughout the last century and into the present, the Navajo Nation’s massive coal deposits were targeted for extraction, no matter the ecological or economic cost. People are still living with the consequences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Studies of Christian missions can easily fall into two different traps: either one-sidedly presenting the missionaries as heroes saving benighted savages or portraying them as villains carrying out cultural imperialism. At the same time, these vastly different perspectives are based on the same error of minimizing native agency. In The... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In 2012, a young Cherokee girl named Veronica became famous. The widespread and often coercive adoption and fostering of Indigenous children by non-Native families has long been known, discussed, and challenged in Indian Country. Now, because of an interview on Dr. Phil with the white South Carolina couple seeking to adopt Veronica, the issue went national. Veronica’s mother had agreed to the adoption, but her father, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, wanted to raise her. And according to the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA), Indian children should grow up in Indian families whenever possible. The Supreme Court disagreed. In a 5-4 decision in June 2013, they remanded the case to the South Carolina Supreme Court, who promptly placed Veronica with the white couple. This story opens Margaret D. Jacobs’ new book, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). But instead of trading in the shallow myths that characterized mainstream media coverage of the “Baby Veronica” case, Jacobs offers a nuanced and often troubling history that puts such incidents in context, documenting the mid-century explosion of adoption and fostering of Indigenous children by white families, not only in the United States but other settler colonial countries like Australia and Canada. Jacobs’ book is one of trauma and violence, but also of courage and resistance, as Indigenous families struggled to reclaim the care of their children, leading to the ICWA in the United States and to national investigations, landmark apologies, and redress in Australia and Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

If George Armstrong Custer had kept off of Greasy Grass that June day in 1875, Vine Deloria, Jr.’s manifesto might well have been called “Canby Died For Your Sins.” The highest ranking U.S. military official to be killed in the so-called “Indian Wars,” General Edward Canby’s death at the hands of Modoc fighters in 1873 unleashed a campaign of ethnic cleansing and guerrilla resistance later colloquialized as the Modoc War. An international sensation at the time and iconic in the decades following, the Klamath Basin struggle has been largely overshadowed in contemporary historical memory. In his razor-sharp account Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), historian Boyd Cothran not only reconstructs this dramatic story but traces how various actors–pushed and pulled by the demands of an acquisitive capitalist market–transformed the memory of the war into a redemptive tale of American innocence, a recasting of colonial violence that still shapes U.S. self-perceptions today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Often when we think of missions to Native Americans or people of African descent, we think of white missionaries. In his book Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2013), Dr. Edward E. Andrews challenges this view. Through his careful research, skilled use of anecdotes, and compelling narrative. Dr. Andrews shows how it was Native Americans and people of African descent themselves who did much of the heavy lifting when it came to mission work. Moreover, Dr. Andrews not only explores the complex relationship between these diverse groups of people within the Protestant churches he studies (primarily Puritan, Anglican, and Moravian), the meeting of Protestant Christianity and indigenous religious beliefs, and the relationship between culture and religion, he also shows how white, black, and Native American missionaries cooperated (and argued with) each other. This book is a fascinating read and is highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of the Atlantic World or missions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Few years in U.S. history call to mind such immediate stock images as 1776. Powdered wigs. Founding fathers. Red coats. And if asked to place this assembly of objects and people, a few cities stand out: Boston. Philadelphia. Williamsburg, perhaps. This is the small world conjured by the Revolutionary era; the remainder of the continent, some 96% percent of the landmass exclusive of the original thirteen colonies that called themselves Continental, conceived of as a blank slate, awaiting inevitable expansion. Claudio Saunt wants to change this. Richard B. Russell Professor of American History at the University of Georgia and co-director of the Center for Virtual History, Saunt’s new book, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (W.W. Norton, 2014), explores nine American places and the diverse peoples who populated them in that fateful year, from the Aleutian Islands to San Diego, the Florida Gulf Coast to the Saskatchewan River. By illustrating complicated webs of trade and exchange, competing empires and diverse Indigenous responses, Saunt makes the case that the stories of people like the Aleuts in the Aleutian archipelago, Miwoks and Costanoans of northern California, Creek Indians of the Deep South and numerous others deserve our historical attention as fully and richly as musket-bearing minutemen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance  (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Mark Rifkin, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and incoming president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, explores three of the most canonical authors in the American literary awakening–Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville–demonstrating how even as their texts mount queer critiques of the state, they take for granted–even depend upon–conceptions of place, politics and personhood normalized in the settler-state’s engagement with Indigenous peoples. Rifkin’s exegesis is relevant far beyond nineteenth-century literary studies. As “settler colonialism” gains currency in left and academic circles as a descriptor of the present reality in the United States, Canada, Israel and elsewhere, there is a tendency to identify its workings only in the encounter between the colonizers and the colonized, the state and Indigenous peoples. This is a mistake, Rifkin warns. None of the novels he interrogates deal specifically with Native people. Yet colonialism is not, he writes, a dynamic that inheres only Native bodies. Rather, it’s a persistent “phenomenon that shapes nonnative subjectivities, intimacies, articulations and sensations separate from whether or not something recognizably Indian comes into view.” Colonialism is thus a common sense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

For all the incisive work published in Native American and Indigenous studies over the past decades, troubling historical myths still circulate in both academic and popular discourse. One of the most persistent is how we tell the story of the Atlantic world as a set of unidirectional processes dominated by Europeans and populated by enslaved Africans, neatly summarized in those triangle-trade illustrations we all studied in high school history class. Paul Gilroy’s seminal work The Black Atlantic opened fresh scholarly ground, conceptualizing the Atlantic world as a cosmopolitan space of cultural exchange and alternative modernities. But for all its originality and profound importance, Gilroy remained entrenched in a black-white dyad; Indigenous people of the Americas were almost entirely ignored. Enter Jace Weaver, Franklin Professor and Director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia (and a former guest on this program), and his new book The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). In this sweeping and skillful book of synthesis, analysis, and original research, Weaver places Indigenous people at the heart of the Atlantic world.  Native people, their ideas, their culture, their products, and their labor traversed the Atlantic in staggering numbers, reconfiguring destinies on both sides of the great ocean. Much like Gilroy, Weaver’s new paradigm is sure to launch numerous further studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Arica Coleman did not start out to write a legal history of “the one-drop rule,” but as she began exploring the relationship between African American and Native peoples of Virginia, she unraveled the story of how the law created a racial divide that the Civil Rights movement has never eroded. Virginia’s miscegenation laws, from the law of hypo-descent to the Racial Integrity Act, are burned into the hearts and culture of Virginians, white, black and Indian. That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia (Indiana University Press, 2014)  demonstrates how people continue to insist on racial discrimination and racial purity even though the legal barriers have been lifted and the biological imperatives of “blood purity” have been discredited. Dr. Coleman traces the origins the one-drop rule–that one African American ancestor made a person “colored”–from the days of slavery to the present. She shows how Indians came to disavow their African American descent in the wake of the Virginia racial purity statutes, and how the Bureau of Indian Affairs process continues to perpetuate a fear of admitting racial mixing. She also reveals how one of the most famous Civil Rights cases of our time, Loving v. Virginia, is not about what everyone thinks; it is not, she argues, about the right of blacks and whites to marry. Dr. Arica L. Coleman is Assistant Professor of Black American Studies at the University of Delaware and a lecturer for the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She has a four-year appointment to the Organization of American Historians Alana committee, which focuses on the status of African American, Latino/Latina American, Native American and Asian American histories and historians. Dr. Coleman has lent her expertise on the history and politics of race and identity formation to the Washington Post, Indian Country Today and most recently NPR’s “Another View,” a weekly program with a focus on contemporary African American issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

If you have spent a bit of time in Germany or with German friends, you may have noticed the deep interest and affinity many Germans have for American Indians. What are the origins of this striking and enduring fascination? In many ways, it might be said to go back to Tacitus’ Germania – or at least, to 19th-century Germans’ readings of Germania – but it was also indelibly shaped by the writings of explorer Alexander von Humboldt and by James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, which were enormously influential in Germany and on Germans abroad. German landscape painters also created some of the most enduring and iconic images of the American West. When Germans in America fought with American Indians over land, their compatriots in Europe tended to side with the Indians. Later, over the successive ruptures of 20th century German history, Germans always found new ways of engaging with American Indians, whether through hobbyist organizations, Wild West shows, through their political commitments to Indian political causes – like the American Indian Movement – or through the astoundingly popular novels of Karl May. Exploring with great verve the transnational connections between various groups of Germans and Native Americans over two centuries, H. Glenn Penny‘s Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) engages in a wide-ranging set of discussions that open up new and unexpected vistas onto questions of modern German history, the history of European and American colonialism, histories and legacies of genocide, and a host of other key topics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Is genetic testing a new national obsession? From reality TV shows to the wild proliferation of home testing kits, there’s ample evidence it might just be. And among the most popular tests of all is for so-called “Native American DNA.” All of this rests upon some uninterrogated (and potentially destructive) assumptions about race and human “origins,” however. In Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Kim TallBear asks what’s at stake for Indigenous communities and First Nations when the premises of this ascendant science are put into practice. TallBear, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas-Austin and enrolled Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, conducted years of research on the politics of “human genome diversity,” decoding the rhetoric of scientists, for-profit companies, and public consumers. The result is a vital and provocative work, tracing lineages between racial science and genetic testing, “blood talk” and “DNA talk,” and the undemocratic culture of a field which claims it can deliver us from racism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

We all know the song. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” And now, thankfully, we all know the controversy; celebrating a perpetrator of genocide might say a few unpleasant things about the country doing the celebrating. But there is something that most Americans don’t know: Europeans had visited the continent at least half a millennium before Columbus. Remembered in two medieval tales known as the “Vinland sagas,” and in 1960 corroborated by a major archaeological discovery, Indigenous people–most likely the ancestors of today’s Wabanaki Confederacy, among others–encountered Norse Viking sailors sometime around 1,000 CE. This used to be common knowledge in the United States. In fact, at moments of heightened xenophobia, Anglo-Americans even celebrated America’s “Norse ancestry,” considering it a far purer lineage than the Italian Columbus. Such debates are just one of the collected national anxieties Annette Kolodny traces in her masterful new book, In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Angl0-American Anxiety of Discovery (Duke University Press, 2012). Combining her unparalleled expertise in literary criticism, close collaboration with Mi’kmaq, Passamaquody and Penobscot communities, and the consultation of innumerable sources, Kolodny deepens our understanding of the “Vinland sagas” and explores what’s at stake in national origin stories in a colonial world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The maps drawn up by early settlers to plot their inexorable expansion were not the first representations of North American space. Colonialism does not simply impose a new reality, after all, but attempts to shatter and discard whole systems of understanding. Indigenous maps preceded the colonial encounter and indigenous maps persist is this extended colonial moment. In Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Mishuana Goeman finds in the poetry and prose of Native women authors the maps of both colonialism’s persistence and resistance to its ongoing containments. Goeman shows how writers like E. Pauline Johnson, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Heid Erdrich point toward a Native future beyond the settler models of territory, jurisdiction, and race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Pauline Turner Strong‘s new book American Indians and the American Imaginary: Cultural Representation Across the Centuries (Paradigm Publishers, 2012) traces the representations of Native Americans across various public spheres of the American imaginary. Based on historical and ethnographic research, she documents how representations of Native Americans have circulated through time and into ever-widening cultural domains. In the first section of the book, Strong begins by defining a theory of representational practices that employs an ethnographic approach. She then traces particular forms of representing Native Americans by exploring the concepts of  “tribe” and “Indian blood.” The third section of the book focuses on narratives of captivity on the indigenous/settler frontier, highlighting the significance of captivity narratives to American national identity. The following section features a critical analysis of “playing Indian” as racial mimesis and cultural appropriation, highlighting the ways in which American youth are socialized into practices such as participating in Thanksgiving pageants of Pilgrims and Indians, using tribal names as part of camp activities, and even playing “cowboys and Indians.” The fifth and final section of the book, “Indigenous Imaginaries,” examines the more recent developments in indigenous politics of representation, including contemporary trends in collaborative ethnographic research and writing, and the installation of the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Pauline Strong contributes a careful analysis that traces the heritage of colonialist representations of American Indians and considers the ways in which contemporary practices and indigenous projects could begin to pose powerful challenges to these dominant representations in the American imaginary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

“School was a place that devalued who we are as Indigenous people,” says Noelani Goodyear-Kapua. These were institutions — at least since white settlers deposed the Indigenous government in the late 19th century — that Native students “tolerated and survived…experienced more as a carceral space than a place of learning.” So she and her community decided to start their own. Founded in 1999, the HKM Public Charter School in Honolulu enacts a host of educational practices that Goodyear-Kapua labels “sovereign pedagogies.” From the “land-based literacies” of their Papa Lo’i agricultural project to Olelo language classes, HKM signaled a “radical departure from the fences, walls, and bell schedules that kept young people cut off from their ‘aina and other storehouses of ancestral knowledge.” Now an associate professor of political science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa,Goodyear-Kapua tells the inspiring story of HKM in The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). No simple tale of triumph, Goodyear-Kapua explores the tensions and contradictions of fostering sovereign education in a settler colonial context and appropriating elements of the neocolonial/neoliberal charter school movement for anti-colonial ends. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The suspension of the so-called “Indian Wars” did not signal colonialism’s end, only a different battlefield. “The calvary man was supplanted–or, rather, supplemented–by the field matron, the Hotchkiss by the transit, and the prison by the school,” writes Beth H. Piatote. “A turn to the domestic front, even as the last shots at Wounded Knee echoed in America’s collective ear, marked not the end of conquest but rather its renewal.” Yet the domestic space was not only a target of invasion; it was also a site of resistance, a fertile ground for Native authors to define what counted as love, home, and kin in an era of coercive assimilation. In Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale University Press, 2013), Piatote brilliantly reads the work of late nineteenth century writers like Pauline Johnson, S. Alice Callahan, D’arcy McNickle and others as a contest over settler domestication. Piatote offers an eloquent exploration of incredible courage and literary acumen, with resonance in our own political moment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Most people today think of war–or really violence of any sort–as for the most part useless. It’s better, we say, just to talk things out or perhaps buy our enemies off. And that usually works. But what if you lived in a culture where fighting was an important part of social status and earning a living? What if, say, you couldn’t get married unless you had gone to war? What if, say, you couldn’t feed your family without raiding your enemies? Such was the case with Chiricahua Apache of the Southwest. As Lance R. Blyth shows in his terrific book Chirichahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680-1880 (Nebraska UP, 2012), war was a necessary part of Chiricahua life, at least in the 17th and 18th centuries. They needed to fight the Spanish in Janos, and there was nothing the Spanish could really do to stop them, at least in the long term. Of course the Spanish–who were, it should be said, invaders–fought back. And so the two communities entered into a two century-long struggle that only ended with the “removal” of the Chiricahua Apache by the United States in the nineteenth century. Listen to Lance tell the fascinating story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Can the spoken word be a reliable record of past events? For many Native people, the answer is unequivocally affirmative. Histories of family, tribe, and nation, narratives of origin and migration, foodways and ceremonies, and the provisions of countless treaties have been passed down through successive generations without written documents. The colonizing society has maintained a starkly different view, elevating the written word to a position of authority and dismissing the authenticity of oral tradition. Are these two views irreconcilable? Exploring the contested memorialization of four controversial episodes in the history of the Delaware (or Lenape) Indians’ encounter with settlers, Andrew Newman finds unexpected connections between colonial documents, recorded oral traditions, and material culture. On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) is a thoughtful meditation on how we know the past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Joy Porter is the author of Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America (University of Nebraska Press, 2011).  She has also written several other publications, including, To Be Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker (University of Oklahoma Press, 2001) and Land & Spirit in Native America (Praeger Press, 2012), and she co-edited a book with Kenneth M. Roemer, entitled The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2005).  In her latest book, she carefully tells the fascinating story of an elusive subject that sparks many historical debates: the organizational history and inclusion of Native American freemasons in America.  She covers the broad chronology of freemasonry in general, from the British origins in the  sixteenth-century to freemasonry in America from the eighteenth- to the twentieth-centuries. She explains how freemasonry is one of many institutions that exemplified the process of the transatlantic exchange of ideas from Europe to the Americas.  More specifically, she examines the Native American freemasonry from an interdisciplinary approach, such as using theories from performance studies and socio-psychological ideas of associationalism.  Furthermore, she examines Native American freemasonry from the lense of understanding the idea of “ornamentalism” (a concept borrowed from Edward Said’s work, Orientalism) to evoke the historical and racial perceptions of Native Americans from the colonial era, and how some of these ideas shifted over time.  Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Deploying hashtags and hunger strikes, flash mobs and vigils, the Idle No More movement of First Nation peoples in Canada is reaching a global audience. While new technology and political conditions alter the landscape of dissent, Indigenous activists using a wide tactical array to further their demands is not anything new, the media’s breathless claims notwithstanding. Frederick E. Hoxie has composed a powerful new book highlighting this truth. In eight moving chapters stretching from the American Revolution to the contemporary period of self-determination, This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made(Penguin 2012) introduces us to courageous men and women whose names might not be familiar but whose legacies are still felt. Facing down a settler state determined on their erasure, they struggled to carve out a place for Native nationhood within — but not necessarily of— the polity that surrounded them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Colin Calloway is one of the leading historians of Native American history today and an award- winning author. Calloway is the John Kimball, Jr. 1943 Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hanover, and has been part of the institution for several decades.  He has published a textbook, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (Bedford/St. Martin’s), which has a fourth edition published in 2012. Not surprisingly, he has also published a fascinating new work entitled Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Dartmouth College Press, 2010).  When we think about the history of Indian education, we may think about the broad legacy of educating Native Americans at boarding schools from the late-nineteenth to the twentieth century, or more specifically about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, or Native American educational program that existed at Hampton University, the historically black college in Virginia.  However, Calloway covers a much older legacy of Native American education rooted in the eighteenth-century, and continues to the present-day at Dartmouth College. As an alumna of the College, I was always fascinated by the “Indian history” at this institution. Some current ways the college pays homage to its original mission include recruiting Native American students, supporting academic and student resources, such as the Native American Studies department, and the Native American Program which hosts college-wide events, such as the upcoming 40th annual Pow Wow held in May.  Calloway’s book provides greater insight into understanding how the shadows of Dartmouth’s complicated colonial history of Native American education are viewed today.  Listen in to learn more about this fascinating study. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Just east of the Norwich-New London Turnpike in Uncasville, Connecticut, stands the Mohegan Congregational Church. By most accounts, it’s little different than the thousands of white-steepled structures dotting the New England landscape: the same high-backed wooden chairs, high ceilings, images of lordly white men. To the careful observer, there is one notable distinction. Just above a traditional cross near the front entrance hangs a single, perfect eagle feather. The juxtaposition might be startling for some. But as Brown historian Linford D. Fisher beautifully illuminates in The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America(Oxford University Press, 2012), Native cultures in New England – and, indeed, most everywhere – are highly incorporative, blending elements of Christian religious practice with their own. This was never more the case than during the eighteenth century evangelical revival known to scholars as the First Great Awakening. A significant turning point in American spiritual life, Native peoples of New England are often left out of the narrative. When they’re included, it’s as passive targets of conversion. Fisher tells a dramatically different story. (Many thanks to New Books in American Studies host Benjamin Smith for composing our new intro music!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Despite what you may have learned in undergraduate surveys or high school textbooks, the nineteenth century was not one long and inexorable march toward Indian dispossession — the real story is far more tragic. As historian Joseph Genetin-Pilawa masterfully relates in his new book Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Native and non-Native reformers developed a host of viable policy alternatives to allotment and forced assimilation in the post-Civil War years. Seizing the ferment of Reconstruction, dynamic figures like Ely Parker — briefly featured in Speilberg’s Lincoln — attempted to harness the power of a growing federal government to protect indigenous nations from rapacious land loss and cultural genocide, only to be outmaneuvered by elite “humanitarian” forces who equated dispossession with progress. Adeptly synthesizing the study of American political development with post-colonial thought, and demonstrating an keen attentiveness to human agency within the limitations of larger structures, Genetin-Pilawa excavates the “repressed alternatives” of late nineteenth century Indian policy, destabilizing a narrative too often presented as inevitable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

“Museums can be very painful sites for Native peoples,” writes Amy Lonetree, associate professor of history at UC-Santa Cruz and a citizen of the Ho Chunk Nation, “as they are intimately tied to the colonization process.” Such a contention appears incongruous to most; museums are supposed to be places of wonder and learning, after all, pillars of our democratic culture. But consider the history. From the wholesale plunder of cultural artifacts and human remains — “If you desecrate a white grave, you wind up in prison,” Walter Eco-Hawk puts it, “but desecrate an Indian grave, and you get a Ph.D.” — to racist representations of disappearance and primitivity, museums are deeply implicated in colonialism. Yet as Lonetree powerfully proposes in Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), it doesn’t need to be that way. Assessing new efforts of collaboration, accountability, and control at Mille Lacs Indian Museum, The National Museum of the American Indian, and The Ziibiwing Center of Anishinaabe Culture & Lifeways, Lonetree lays out a path toward decolonization, putting these once aloof institutions to the task of sovereignty, survivance, and the telling of hard truths. This work is not only politically vital, but ultimately makes for a better museum. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Brendan C. Lindsay‘s impressive if deeply troubling new book centers on two concepts long considered anathema: democracy and genocide. One is an ideal of self-government, the other history’s most unspeakable crime. Yet as Lindsay deftly describes, Euro-American settlers in California harnessed democratic governance to expel, enslave and ultimately murder 90% of a population on their ancestral homelands in the mid-to-late 19th century. Murder State: California’s Native Genocide, 1846-1873 (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) is difficult but vital reading for residents of any state. Culling evidence from newspapers, public records, and personal narratives, Lindsay’s lays out an ironclad case that “genocide” is precisely the word to describe to the process faced by Native people in California, despite its rarified usage in academic and public discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Most historians have understood Native American history through the use of the “middle ground” metaphor. Notably, historian Richard White used this metaphor to explain the social relationships between Native American with European Americans in the Great Lakes region in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. Increasingly, more studies have also emerged to explain such encounters between Native Americans and African Americans, particularly in the Southeast. Angela Pulley Hudson, Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M, is firmly engaged within this wide body of literature in her first published monograph, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). She vividly describes the history of Creeks and their ideas about encounters with outsiders of their land along the geographic borders of Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee from the early national era to the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Her work not only contributes to the analysis of contested borderlands in American history, but also complicates our understanding about the intersections of racial, gender and kinship boundaries in an eloquent way that makes for a great read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

If you watched the U.S. broadcast of the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, you may have heard Matt Lauer and Bob Costas mention Jim Thorpe during Sweden’s entrance. Thorpe, arguably the best all-around athlete in U.S. history, won Olympic gold in both the pentathlon and the decathlon in the Stockholm 1912 games. But his victory was marred by a controversial International Olympic Committee (IOC) ruling that stripped him of his medals six months later. In Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (Bison Books, 2012), the first comprehensive biography of Thorpe, biographer Kate Buford explores how Thorpe’s Native American heritage shaped his life, but also the impact Thorpe himself had upon American sports. Ultimately, he was the country’s first celebrity athlete, excelling at both baseball and football. His life was memorialized in a 1951 film and, in 1963, Thorpe was among the charter class inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Despite his other successes, the revocation of Jim Thorpe’s medals remains a source of contention for his admirers, Buford among them.In 1982, the IOC approved the reinstatement of Thorpe’s medals and during London 2012, the Hammersmith tube station has been temporarily renamed in Thorpe’s honor. But, despite public outcry, the IOC still refuses to enter Thorpe’s scores into the official record of Olympic events. As Buford writes: “A gentle person, intelligent and funny, with many flaws, Jim Thorpe was not a complicated man. But what happened to him was.”   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Most readers are probably more familiar with the context of slavery or captivity in the context the African slave trade than in the Americas. Some may assume that slavery in the Americas was exclusively a phenomenon that became institutionalized into chattel slavery and racially codified exclusively against African Americans by the seventeenth-century.  There has been increased scholarly attention over the last decade to expand our ideas of slavery, including scholarship about enslavement of African Americans within the “Five Civilized Tribes.”  However, there has been little focus on the long and nuanced history of Native American captivity practices. Historian Christina Snyder argues that we have to re-imagine the history of captivity by understanding the evolution of such practices amongst Native Americans in her prize-winning book, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2010).  Captivity practices existed amongst many indigenous nations from the pre-Columbian era throughout the nineteenth-century.   She broadly describes the evolution of these  practices from incorporating captives into kin networks, and to shifting notions of slavery that became codified by race.   She begins her work by vividly describing Mississippian indigenous cultures of the pre-Columbian era, including the fascinating history of Cahokia, and the captives who were buried in these mounds. She also discusses the roles of Native American women, including Cherokee “beloved women” would were closely involved in determining the fate of captives.   Her work is captivating and extensive, and greatly contributes to the historiography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The term “Indian Country” evokes multiple themes. Encompassing legal, geographic, and ideological dimensions, “Indian Country” is commonly understood to be a space outside of or surrounded by the boundaries of the United States. It’s also been used for a pan-tribal, continental consciousness, found, for example, in the popular periodical Indian Country Today. For non-Natives familiar with the term, however, it’s safe to say what the term does not connote: cities. Indian County is “out there” somewhere, a dusty reservation remote from the bustle of modern life. Historian Nicolas G. Rosenthal argues that this concept is not only problematic but wholly inaccurate. In Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Rosenthal illuminates the forces that drew or forced Indian people to Los Angeles, the “urban Indian capital of the United States,” and the process of forming individual and communal identities away from tribal homelands. Los Angeles typifies a larger trend. In 1940, the census counted 27,000 Indians living in cities, about 8% of the total Native population. By 1950, it spiked to 45%. In 1980, 53%. While the majority of Rosenthal’s compelling narrative focuses on city of angels, he also reckons with these wider trends, reconceptualizing “Indian Country” to reflect a complicated and diverse reality. His intervention is invaluable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Late in 1872, as the United States sought to clear the newly incorporated Southwest of its indigenous inhabitants, a company under Capt. James Burns came upon an encampment of Kwevkepayas (a branch of Yavapais) sheltering in the shadow of rock overhang above the Salt River Canyon. The soldiers wasted no time on the formalities of battle. They rained down fire, bullets ricocheting from the roof the cave, felling the refugees below. They even pushed down boulders. None survived. Well, almost none. A few days prior, the advancing soldiers had come across a young boy of eight or nine looking for a missing horse. “They made a rush for me,” Hoomothya would later write. “They pulled me over rocks and bushes. The men didn’t care whether I got hurt or not.” But unlike Burns’ Kwevkepaya siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandfather, the invaders did not kill him. In fact, the man responsible for his family’s extermination would adopt the young Hoomothya as something between a son and a servant, renaming him Mike Burns. Over a century later, the prolific writer and editor Gregory McNamee has brought us Burns’ remarkable story. In The Only One Living to Tell: The Autobiography of a Yavapai Indian (University of Arizona Press, 2012), Burns recounts his survival of the massacre, his time as a scout for the U.S. military on the campaign against Geronimo, his education n white schools, and eventual reconnection with his Yavapai community. “Mike Burns lived in two worlds,” McNamee tell us, “and he was at home in neither.” But his intelligence, humor and compassion illuminates both in profound and unexpected ways. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The birth of the American republic produced immense and existential challenges to Native people in proximity to the fledgling nation. Perhaps none faced a greater predicament than the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (popularly known as the Iroquois). Divided by the U.S.-English conflict, their landbase ransacked by American soldiers and speculators, their once considerable political power reduced, and their culture threatened by an influx of zealous missionaries — such is what historian Matthew Dennis in his powerful new book, Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), has termed “the colonial crucible.” Yet, Dennis persuades us, “the Seneca story is not mere prologue.” One of the Six Nations residing in what became western New York State, the Seneca adapted to the invasion of their homeland, building upon elements of their culture and selectively embracing change to survive the economic and political transformations of the post-Revolutionary period. The revelations of the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, blended with elements of Christianity, yielded a new and powerful religion that rejected white degradation. But in the process, the prophet challenged the powerful position of women in Seneca society, as accusations of witchcraft – newly focused on women – led to violence. As western New York continues its decades long process of deindustrialization, losing population with every closed down factory, the Seneca Nation remains, vibrant as ever. Matthew Dennis’ fascinating new book helps us see just how they did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Here’s a study-guide prepared to accompany the interview. For as much as recent decades have witnessed a patriarchal backlash against the growing visibility of LGBTQ people in North American society, there is another, increasingly popular narrative embodied by Dan Savage’s ubiquitous internet promise: “It gets better.” As barriers to equal treatment under the law are removed and the state incorporates gender and sexual diversity under its protective umbrella — marriage rights extended, prohibitions to military service lifted, etc — queer politics get folded into the progressive march of the West toward equity and tolerance. But what about for queer people whose land is violently occupied by the very body politic going about all this incorporating? As Scott Lauria Morgensen powerfully articulates in his new book, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Indigenous Two-Spirit activists work for both decolonization and sexual freedom within their homelands, resisting state incorporation, cultural appropriation, and narratives of their “disappearance.”Brilliantly extending (and intervening) on the work of earlier theorists, Morgensen traces how modern sexual identities are built upon the replacement of indigenous sexuality and the development of settler colonialism in what is now the United States and Canada. “Native and queer studies must regard settler colonialism as a key condition of modern sexuality on stolen land,” Morgensen argues, “and use this analysis to explain the power of settler colonialism among Native and non-Native People.” This is not simply an indictment. Morgensen shows how conversations between Natives and non-Natives can open up new frameworks for political activism and scholarly research, so long as they remain accountable to the ongoing colonization of Native lands. As mainstream LGBTQ organizations abandon their social movement pasts, Morgensen work is a clarion call for a new wave of decolonial queer organizing.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In a world of painfully narrow academic monographs, rare is the work that teams with ideas, engagements, and interventions across a wide terrain of social life. In The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Jodi Byrd has produced such a book. Byrd, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and assistant professor of American Indian studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, follows the transit of paradigmatic “Indianness” through the pathways of colonialism, race, and empire. She engages not only the titans of critical theory but the substance of everyday politics, and finds an often disavowed indigeneity in places as disparate as Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Jonestown Massacre, the development of astronomical sciences and the origins of blues music. Central to this wide-ranging project is a fundamental proposition that in this perhaps terminal phase of American empire, reckoning with – and redressing – the ongoing colonization of Native lands and Native people is more vital than ever. “Bringing indigeneity and Indians front and center to discussions of U.S. empire as it has traversed across Atlantic and Pacific worlds is a necessary intervention at this historical moment,” Byrd writes, “precisely because it is through the elisions, erasures, enjambments, and repetitions of Indianness that one might see the stakes in decolonial, restorative justice tied to land, life, and grievability.”   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Anyone who’s turned on the television in the past several decades is familiar with the ubiquitous before-and-after picture. On the left, your present state: undesirable, out of shape, balding perhaps. Add ingredient X – maybe a fad diet or a hair transplant – and the picture on the right shows your new and improved future. While this visual juxtaposition might seem harmless enough – save for the whole manipulative advertising thing – it has a rather more nefarious history in the United States, bound intimately, like so much, with the question of race. The before-and-after pictures were a favorite of Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the pioneering Carlisle Indian School, where in the late 19th and early 20th century, Native American children from the recently pacified West were brought thousands of miles to a military base outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Haggard by the exhausting and traumatic train ride, Pratt’s photographer would snap the “before” picture, using props and bad lighting to emphasize the alleged “savagery” of the newly arrived children. Months later, once the students were fitted in contemporary Euroamerican fashion, their hair cut short, and illuminated by soft-lighting, the “after” photo was snapped. These dual images – attesting to the supposedly civilizing effects of the boarding school – were distributed to government elites and the American public, proof that the indigenous population of the continent could be molded in the image of the white settler. In his impressive new book, The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School (University of New Mexico Press, 2011) Hayes Peter Mauro brings to bear his considerable skills as an art historian and critical theorist to deconstruct the visual culture produced at Carlisle. Placing them squarely in the context of triumphalist American myths and the popular pseudo-science of race, Mauro uses these photographs to ask powerful questions and arrive at some unsettling answers. It is a fascinating work, illuminating not only the troubling culture of the federal assimilation project, but the power of the image to mold both the observer and the observed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

For the past half century, Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12-step recovery program has been the dominant method for treating alcohol abuse in the United States. Reservation communities have been no exception. But as Erica Prussing vividly describes in her new book,White Man’s Water: The Politics of Sobriety in a Native American Community (University of Arizona Press, 2011), a one-size-fits-all approach to treatment does not, in fact, fit all. An assistant professor of anthropology and community and behavior health at the University of Iowa, Prussing lived for three years on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, working with community organizations, building long-lasting relationships, and gathering testimonies of alcohols’ often disruptive impacts on the lives of many Northern Cheyenne. While many young women have embraced the 12-step program, others – particularly of the older generation – find its moral assumptions foreign and unhelpful. What emerges from Prussing’s account is not a reductive and totalizing “Cheyenne culture” but rather a complex negotiation of tradition, community, and recovery in the face of persistent colonial challenges. This nuance and attention to detail makes Prussing’s call for indigenous self-determination in health care all the more powerful. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

“The history of Oklahoma is a history of movement, possession, and dispossession. It is American history told in fast-foward,” writes historian David A. Chang in the introduction to The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). “It captures the dynamics of global history in the middle of a continent.” As a lifelong East-Coaster, I admit this initially struck me as a little hyperbolic. Oklahoma may indeed be fertile ground for scholars, particularly in Native American Studies, but American history in fast-forward? The dynamics of global history? These are concepts not generally associated in popular discourse with the Sooner state; certainly not for a New Yorker like myself. David Chang has exploded my coastal arrogance. In this intellectual tour-de-force and gripping historical narrative, Chang illustrates how in the aftermath of the Creek Nation’s forced removal from the Southeast to Oklahoma, conflicts over landownership – present in every region but magnified in Indian Territory-cum-Oklahoma before and after the devastation of the Civil War and the Dawes Allotment Act – provided the central staging ground for a complicated and often surprising formation of racial and national identities. From Creek’s struggle to maintain their national coherence against a colonial onslaught, to African American settlers seeking new opportunities in the land-rich West, to the agrarian radicalism of the early 20th century and the violent counterrevolution of white supremacy, Oklahoma indeed captures the dynamics of history. The Color of the Land shows exactly how. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Cathleen D. Cahill’s groundbreaking new work, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933 (UNC Press, 2011), lives up to the title: it is a social history in the best sense of the term. Paying close attention to the people who carried out federal Indian policy “on the ground,” Cahill uncovers a world of ambivalence, hubris and resistance in the usually monolithic story of Westward expansion and forced assimilation. Cahill introduces us to fascinating characters like Minnie Braithwaite, a daughter of Virginia’s upper class, who defied her family’s wishes and headed out West and “teach the Indian.” And then there’s Esther Burnett Horne, a Shoshone woman fought colonialism even as she worked as an instructor for the Indian Service. “I wanted to provide [my students] with the same security and sense of self that my Indian teachers…had instilled in me,” she wrote. Indeed, the role of American Indian labor in the Indian Service is one of the most surprising and important chapters in Cahill’s work. While Cahill carefully describes the details of federal policy  (the “intimate colonialism” which characterized so much of the Indian Service’s work), she does not eschew bigger questions. By placing the Indian Service in the broader narrative of American political development, Cahill emphasizes the centrality of the federal assimilation campaign to the creation of the modern American welfare state. In Federal Fathers and Mothers, Cahill has balanced micro and macro and, in so doing, realized much of the promise of social history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

When an Atlantic Coastline Railroad train pulled into Red Springs, North Carolina, the conductor faced a difficult dilemma. Whom to allow in coach class with whites and whom to relegate to the back? In an effort to clarify the matter, the mayor of neighboring Pembroke demanded that the railroad build three separate waiting rooms at the town train station. Such confusion was common place in Robeson County, North Carolina, during the height of the Jim Crow era. That’s because Robeson is home to the Lumbee People, the largest Indian nation east of the Mississippi River and a thorn in the side of those who sought to maintain a simple black/white dichotomy in the South. Malinda Mayor Lowery’s new book Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) dramatically rewrites accepted Jim Crow narratives. Not only did Indian communities persist in the U.S. South after the Removal – the period of ethnic cleansing generally cited as the denouement of indigenous peoples in the region – but they complicated the racial landscape in unexpected ways, negotiating a space of autonomy and independence with the forces of white supremacy in 20th century North Carolina. Lowery, a Lumbee herself and assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, offers us that unique combination of scholarly rigor and passionate prose, exploring the complex process of identity formation in the face of – and occasionally in concert with – segregation, federal bureaucracy and the discourse of “race” and “blood.” For students and scholars of Native American Studies, Southern history, and the Jim Crow era, it is essential reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Essay collections are often a repository of an author’s lesser works, an attempt by publishers to milk every last penny from a well-regarded scholar. This is not the case with Jace Weaver’s new book Notes from a Miner’s Canary: Essays on the State of Native America (University of New Mexico Press, 2010). He is, indeed, a well-regarded scholar. As director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia and the author of a number of foundational texts in the field, Weaver can certainly command the academic gravitas necessary for published article collections. But Notes from a Miner’s Canary is no mere repository. Weaver brilliantly harmonizes a number of diverse and compelling articles into a powerful primer for students and scholars of Native American Studies, moving deftly through environmentalism, NAGPRA, indigenous architecture, theology, literature, and far more. Grounded in a firm belief in the need for engaged scholarly work accountable to Native communities, Weaver writes with the passion of an advocate and the cool acumen of an intellectual. (Weaver is of course trained both as a lawyer and an academic) If Weaver is indeed right that much of the field is a “mess” (a quote from the book’s previously published opening chapter which Weaver argues in this interview is often taken out of context), Notes from a Miner’s Canary is a formidable effort at creating a meaningful coherence: interdisciplinary openness, intellectual rigor, and political commitment.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

For most non-native Americans, the Red Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s appeared out of nowhere. Convinced of triumphalist myths of the disappearing (or disappeared) Indian, white America relegated native communities to the margins of society. Then, “like a hurricane” (in the words of Robert Warrior and Paul Chaat Smith), the take-over of Alcatraz Island in 1969, the seizure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972, and finally the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee–a dramatic series of events which placed First Nations at the heart of the era’s great social upheavals. But does this snapshot tell the whole story? In his fascinating new book Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), Bradley Shreve finds the roots of American Indian activism in the nascent inter-tribal organizing of the early 20th century and the various attempts at fashioning independent organizations of dedicated native youth over the following decades. In the process, Shreve demonstrates how the militant actions of the 1960s and 70s “followed in the footsteps of an earlier generation.” He writes, “Indeed, movements for social change do not emerge in a vacuum. They are built upon precedent, they incorporate and borrow ideas from the past, and they may find inspiration from contemporaries.” This is a story of the past informing the present, of movements building on tradition, and the dramatic arrival of an era of self-determination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Of all the events in American history, two are far and away the most troubling: slavery and the near-genocidal war against native Americans. In truth, we’ve dealt much better with the former than the latter. The slaves were emancipated. After a long and painful struggle, their descendants won their full civil rights. Though that struggle is not yet finished, near equality has been reached in many areas of American life. And almost all Americans understand that slavery was wrong. None of this can be said about the campaign against native Americans. Instead of emancipation, the Indians–or rather those left after the slaughter–were “removed” to reservations where their way of life was destroyed. After a long and painful struggle, many of their descendants are still in those reservations and living in poverty. They struggle still, but are not equal to other Americans by most measures. And many Americans refuse to believe that the U.S. was wrong in killing, sequestering, and impoverishing the native Americans. They are wrong to do so, for we know what happened and why thanks to historians such as Heather Cox Richardson. In her eye-opening new book Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (Basic Books, 2010) she shows just how calculated, self-serving, and even spiteful the White assault on the Plains Indians was. Despite what they said (mostly to the Indians themselves), the Whites never had any real intention of allowing the Sioux and others to keep their land, maintain their way of life, or even to continue to exist. It was clear to them that the Indians would either become White (meaning would take up farming) or would go. The Whites weren’t exactly cynics; rather they were self-deceiving fatalists. They came to believe that destiny itself compelled them to assimilate or annihilate the Indians. But destiny didn’t destroy the Plains Indians. The government of the United States of America did. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies