New Books In 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 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 annex

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 f

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 boardi

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

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

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 do

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

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

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 politic

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 megap

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 c

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

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

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

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 explain

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 t

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 myt

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 an

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 nat