New Books In Native American Studies

Today I talked to Robert Wright about Indigenous Autonomy at La Junta de Los Rios: Traders, Allies, and Migrants on New Spain's Northern Frontier (Texas Tech UP, 2023). The Indigenous nations of the valley of the Rio Grande that is now centered upon Ojinaga, Chihuahua, and Presidio, Texas―the La Junta valley in colonial times―had a long and unique history with Hispanics during the colonial period. Their valley was the initial route to New Mexico and West Texas explored by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s. In the mid-1600s, the Juntans began engaging in long-distance migrant labor in Nueva Vizcaya, and in the 1680s they began inviting Franciscan missionaries and serving as important military allies to Hispanic troops. Yet for seventy-five years only the missionaries, without any Hispanic military or civilians, lived among them, due to both the remoteness of their valley from Hispanic settlements and the Juntans' insistence upon their autonomy. This is unique in Spanish colonial annals on the northern frontie

In Dr. Susan A. Brewer's fascinating The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory (Cornell University Press, 2024), she recounts the story of the parcel of central New York land on which she grew up. Brewer and her family had worked and lived on this land for generations when the Oneida Indians claimed that it rightfully belonged to them. Why, she wondered, did she not know what had happened to this place her grandfather called the best land. Here, she tells its story, tracing over the past four hundred years the two families—her own European settler family and the Oneida/Mohawk family of Polly Denny—who called the best land home. Situated on the passageway to the west, the ancestral land of the Oneidas was coveted by European colonizers and the founders of the Empire State. The Brewer and Denny families took part in imperial wars, the American Revolution, broken treaties, the building of the Erie Canal, Native removal, the rise and decline of family farms, bitter land claims con

Growing up in a remote corner of the world’s largest rainforest, Pio, Maria, and Oita learned to hunt wild pigs and tapirs, and gathered Brazil nuts and açaí berries from centuries-old trees. The first highway pierced through in 1960. Ranchers, loggers, and prospectors invaded, and the kids lost their families to terrible new weapons and diseases. Pushed by the government to assimilate, they struggled to figure out their new, capitalist reality, discovering its wonders—cars, refrigerators, TV sets, phones—as well as a way to acquire them: by selling the natural riches of their own forest home. They had to partner with the white men who’d hunted them, but their wealth grew legendary, the envy of the nation—until decades of suppressed trauma erupted into a massacre, bloody retribution that made headlines across the globe. Based on six years of immersive reporting and research, When We Sold God's Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon (Grand Central Publishing, 2024) tells a unique kind of ad

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 a

In this deeply personal account, University of Oklahoma associate professor of Native American Studies Dr. Farina King describes the history and present of Diné dóó Gáamalii, Navajo people who, in her words, "walk a Latter-day Saints pathway." The book, Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century (UP of Kansas, 2023), uses her family's history of life in the LDS church to explore the complicated and very human relationships Diné people have with so-called Mormonism. Refusing to be defined by easy stereotypes, King's account shows people coming to the church and remaining in the church for deeply personal and deeply felt reasons, often in the face of prejudice both from within and without wider Indigenous communities. Diné dóó Gáamalii is the story of complex religious life in the American West, and a history of acceptance being found sometimes where it might be least expected. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a prem

For much of her life, Angelique Renville had decisions made for her. Where to live, who to live with, where to attend school, what to do with her land. That changed in 1863 when she made a plan and successfully hatched her plan to escape, living the end of her life on her own terms. This is the story Dr. Linda Clemmons tells in Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville & the Struggle for Indigenous Identity, 1845-1876 (South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2023).  Hers is a story, yes, of defeat and loss, but also so much more than that. Of a young woman carving her own path through a world in flux, and finding space to make choices even when those choices are limited. And it's a story with afterlives, as the web of connections created by Renville during her life continued even after her untimely death in 1876. As a work of biography, Unrepentant Dakota Woman does not pretend to speak for all Dakota women, or even all 19th century Dakota women born into fur trade families, but does show how one life

A wolf’s howl is felt in the body. Frightening and compelling, incomprehensible or entirely knowable, it is a sound that may be heard as threat or invitation but leaves no listener unaffected. Toothsome fiends, interfering pests, or creatures wild and free, wolves have been at the heart of Canada’s national story since long before Confederation. Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin: Wolves and the Making of Canada (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022) by Dr. Stephanie Rutherford contends that the role in which wolves have been cast - monster or hero - has changed dramatically through time. Exploring the social history of wolves in Canada, Dr. Rutherford weaves an innovative tapestry from the varied threads of historical and contemporary texts, ideas, and practices in human-wolf relations, from provincial bounties to Farley Mowat’s iconic Never Cry Wolf. These examples reveal that Canada was made, in part, through relationships with nonhuman animals. Wolves have always captured the human imagination. In sketching out

Shortly after the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789, twenty-two-year-old Andrew Jackson pledged his allegiance to the king of Spain. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, imperial control of the North American continent remained an open question. Spain controlled the Mississippi River, closing it to American trade in 1784, and western men on the make like Jackson had to navigate the overlapping economic and political forces at work with ruthless pragmatism. In Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade (University of Virginia Press, 2024), Dr. Susan Gaunt Stearns takes readers back to a time when there was nothing inevitable about the United States’ untrammeled westward expansion. Her work demonstrates the centrality of trade on and along the Mississippi River to the complex development of the political and economic structures that shaped the nascent American republic. Dr. Stearns’s perspective-shifting book reconfigures our understanding of key postrevolutionary

Armand Garnet Ruffo's staggeringly powerful poetry collection, The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, was published in spring 2024 by Wolsak & Wynn. This collection of poems and lyric essays brings to life not only the story of the famed WWI Indigenous sniper, but also the complexities of telling Indigenous stories. From Wasauksing (Parry Island) to the trenches of WWI to the stage, Ruffo moves seamlessly through time in these poems, taking the reader on a captivating journey through Pegahmagabow’s story and onto the creation of Sounding Thunder, the opera based on his life. Throughout, Ruffo uses the Ojibwe concept of two-eyed seeing, which combines the strengths of western and Indigenous ways of knowing, and invites the reader to do the same, particularly through the inclusion of the Anishinaabemowin language within the collection. These are poems that challenge western conventions of thinking, that celebrate hope and that show us a new way to see the world. The collection also just won the Betsy

California has more unrecognized Native tribes than any other state - what led to this strange state of affairs, and what does this mean in practice?  In Unrecognized in California: Federal Acknowledgment and the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians (U Washington Press, 2024), San Diego State associate professor Olivia Chilcote answers these questions through the history and experience of her own tribe. Despite the inherent tribal sovereignty of the San Luis Rey Band, and indeed, of all Native tribes and nations, the long and difficult past of colonialism in California - from the Spanish, to the Mexican, to the American empires - has provided an array of obstacles to the acquisition of land and tribal recognition for the San Luis Rey Band and others. This unrecognized status has kept them from accessing several programs and protections, including NAGPRA. Yet, despite these headwinds, the San Luis Rey Band and other unrecognized California tribes nonetheless practice sovereignty in other ways, and in doing so

In 1708, the governor of South Carolina responded to a request from London to provide a detailed account of the colony's population. Among the groups included in this report was an often-overlooked segment—Native Americans, who comprised roughly a quarter of the colony’s enslaved population. However, not long after, references to enslaved Native people largely disappeared from the historical record. In Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), D. Andrew Johnson argues that Native Americans played a pivotal role in shaping South Carolina's economy and culture. Through extensive research, including a database of over 15,000 references to enslaved individuals, Dr. Johnson employs an interdisciplinary approach to expand the historical narrative and center the experiences of enslaved Native people. In addition to his archival work, he uses spatial analysis and archaeological evidence to explore Native slavery within the context of plantation life. W

An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods: Political Ideology and Insurrection in the Mayan Popul Vuh and the Andean Huarochiri Manuscript (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) is the first comprehensive comparison of two of the greatest epics of the Indigenous peoples of Latin America: the Popul Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala and the Huarochiri Manuscript of Peru's lower Andean regions. The rebellious tone of both epics illuminates a heretofore overlooked aspect in Latin American Indigenous colonial writing: the sense of political injustice and spiritual sedition directed equally at European-imposed religious practice and at aspects of Indigenous belief. The link between spirituality and political upheaval in Native colonial writing has not been sufficiently explored until this work. Sharonah Esther Fredrick applies a multidisciplinary approach that utilizes history, literature, archaeology, and anthropology in equal measure to situate the Mayan and Andean narratives within the paradigms of their developing

In Cattle in the Postcolumbian Americas: A Zooarchaeological Historical Study (University Press of Florida, 2024), Nicolas Delsol compares zooarchaeological and material evidence from sites across Mesoamerica and the Caribbean to show how the introduction of cattle, beginning with imports by Spanish colonizers in the 1500s, shaped colonial American society. Before European colonization, cows were vital in European and African societies but were unknown to the Native communities of the Western Hemisphere. This book traces their impact in the Americas by using a broad range of methods, such as ancient DNA analyses on faunal collections from major postcolumbian sites. Delsol describes the place of cattle in the colonial culture and landscape, beginning with the transportation of cattle across the Atlantic and moving to herding practices in new habitats, butchery techniques, and the production, trading, and use of cow byproducts. Cattle in the Postcolumbian Americas is the first large-scale regional archaeologica

The Shawnee leader Tecumseh came to prominence in a war against the United States waged from 1811 to 1815. In 1805, Tecumseh's younger brother Lalawethika (soon to be known as "the Prophet") had a vision for an Indian revitalization movement that would restore Native culture and resist American expansion. Tecumseh organized the growing support for this movement, which came from Indigenous peoples across the Old Northwest and parts of the Great Plains, into a loose but powerful military alliance. In late 1811, while Tecumseh was away on a recruiting mission in the South, General William Henry Harrison led an army to the center of Native resistance at Prophetstown in present-day Indiana. In the early morning hours of November 7, in what came to be known as the Battle of Tippecanoe, Harrison's men fought off an Indian attack, which marked the beginning of Tecumseh's War. Seven months later, when the United States declared war on Britain, thus initiating the War of 1812, the British and Tecumseh forged an allianc

Walls profoundly shape the spaces we live in and the places we move through, impinge on our everyday lives, and entangle power relations, identity, and hierarchies. Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls (Lexington Books, 2024) explores these effects in the context of Arviat, Nunavut. Lisa-Jo Van den Scott lays out the inherent social processes, arguing that walls, in addition to concealing colonial power relations, are boundary objects, cultural objects, and technological objects. Van den Scott's ethnography of Arviammiut's (people of Arviat's) contemporary lived experiences reveals the ways in which Arviammiut are living in a foreign space, how this impacts their experiences, and how they exercise agency in navigating and reinventing these spaces in resilient and heterogenous ways. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media

Despite centuries of colonialism, Indigenous peoples still occupy parts of their ancestral homelands in what is now Eastern North Carolina--a patchwork quilt of forested swamps, sandy plains, and blackwater streams that spreads across the Coastal Plain between the Fall Line and the Atlantic Ocean. In these backwaters, Lumbees and other American Indians have adapted to a radically transformed world while maintaining vibrant cultures and powerful connections to land and water. This reality is paralleled in Indigenous communities worldwide as Indigenous people continue to assert their rights to self-determination by resisting legacies of colonialism and the continued transformation of their homelands through pollution, unsustainable development, and climate change.  In On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice (UNC Press, 2024), environmental scientist Ryan Emanuel, a member of the Lumbee tribe, shares stories from North Carolina about Indigenous survival and resilience in the face of radical e

In 1857, the Meskwaki Nation began the long process of piecing their homelands back together. After decades of war, dispossession, and removal at the hands of the American government and American settlers, the Meskwaki, bit by bit, purchase by purchase, started to reestablish a land base along the banks of the Iowa River, more than a century and a half before Land Back became a hash tag.  In Red Earth Nation: A History of the Meskwaki Settlement (Oklahoma UP, 2024), the historian Eric Zimmer traces the history of this settlement (importantly, not a reservation) and the Meskwaki people through their ancient establishment as a people, and their fight to retain identity, land, and indeed, their very existence. A powerful example of community-based history writing, Zimmer tells a story that, while certainly not a straight line, refuses to be simply a tale of woe and hardship. Instead, this is a story of survival, perseverance, and of savvy politics even in the face of the most difficult obstacles.  Learn more abo

As the author of a graphic history, I loved chatting with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Paul Peart-Smith about the graphic interpretation of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2024). An Indigenous Peoples' History of The United States originally came out in 2014 with Beacon Press. In 2019 it was adapted into a Young Peoples version by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese. In 2021 it was one of the three foundational texts for the amazing HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes, written and directed by Raoul Peck. The other featured books were two of my all-time favorites Sven Lindqvist’ Exterminate All the Brutes: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Paul Peart-Smith has adapted what many regard as the first history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples into a stunningly powerful graphic history. Through evocative full color art

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 foreg

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 d