Category Archives: Native Americans

History and Historians, Liberal Arts, Native American Bibliography, Native Americans, New Publications

What You Need To Read

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I will post each quarter a list of items I have placed on my “To Get To” list, scholarship I will consider as I work to keep current in this vast field and begin to contemplate a third edition of Native America.   If there is something I have missed, or a work you would like me to add to the list, please feel free to drop me a line. For the March bibliography, click here.

Abram Kercsmar, Joshua. “Wolves at Heart: How Dog Evolution Shaped Whites’ Perceptions of Indians in North America.” Environmental History 21, no. 3 (July 2016): 516-540.

Anderson, Gary Clayton, “The Native Peoples of the American West: Genocide or Ethnic Cleansing?” Western Historical Quarterly 47, no. 4 (November 2016): 407-433.

Barr, Juliana.  “There’s No Such Thing as ‘Prehistory’: What the Longue Duree of Caddo and Pueblo History Tells Us About Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 74 (April 2017), 203-240.

Bowes, John P. ““Hang Them All”: George Wright and the Plateau Indian War.” Journal Of Military History 81, no. 2 (April 2017): 569-571.

Brewer II, Joseph Paul, et al. “Renaming the Indians: State-Sponsored Legibility through Permanent Family Surnames among the Sisseton and Wahpeton at Lake Traverse, 1903.” American Indian Culture & Research Journal 40, no. 3 (July 2016): 47-66.

Britten, Thomas A. “Abraham Lincoln as Great Father: A Look at Federal Indian Policy, 1861-1865.” American Indian Culture & Research Journal 40, no. 3 (July 2016): 103-122.

Bunnell, David.  Good Friday on the Rez: A Pine Ridge Odyssey, (New York: St. Martin’s, 2017).

Carder, Susan Fae. “The Development of a Gaming Enterprise for the Navajo Nation.” American Indian Quarterly 40, no. 4 (Fall2016 2016): 295-332.

Carlson, Shawn B., M. James Blackman, and Ronald L. Bishop. “Texas Mission Ceramics: Origins of Manufacture and Distribution during the Eighteenth Century.” Historical Archaeology 50, no. 4 (October 2016): 65-91.

Cevasco, Carla. “This is My Body: Communion and Cannibalism in Colonial New England and New France.” New England Quarterly 89, no. 4 (December 2016): 556-586.

Clatterbuck, Mark. Crow Jesus: Personal Stories of Native Religious Belonging, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017).

Colwell, Chip  Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 22017).

Conrad, Paul. “Empire through Kinship.” Early American Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal 14, no. 4 (Fall2016 2016): 626-660.

Fisher, Linford D. “Why shall wee have peace to bee made slaves”: Indian Surrenderers during and after King Philip’s War.” Ethnohistory 64, no. 1 (January 2017): 91-114.

Fisher, Samuel.  “Fit Instruments in a Howling Wilderness: Colonists, Indians, and the Origins of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly ,73 (October 2016), 647-680.

Foster, H. Thomas. “The identification and significance of Apalachicola for the origins of the creek Indians in the Southeastern United States.” Southeastern Archaeology 36, no. 1 (April 2017): 1-13.

Galler, Robert. “Councils, Petitions and Delegations: Crow Creek Activism and the Progressive Era in Central South Dakota.” Journal Of The Gilded Age & Progressive Era 16, no. 2 (April 2017): 206-227.

Garrod, Andrew and Robert Kilkenny, I am Where I come From: Native American College Students and Graduates Tell Their Life Stories, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017).

Gelo, Daniel J. “Two Episodes in Texas Indian History Reconsidered: Getting the Facts Right about the Lafuente Attack and the Fort Parker Raid.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 120, no. 4 (April 2017): 441-460.

 Grann, David.  Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, (New York: Doubleday, 2017).

 Harrison, Daniel F. “Change Amid Continuity, Innovation within Tradition: Wampum Diplomacy at the Treaty of Greenville, 1795,” Ethnohistory, 64 (April 2017), 191-215.

Herrmann, Rachel B. “No useless Mouth”: Iroquoian Food Diplomacy in the American Revolution.” Diplomatic History 41, no. 1 (January 2017): 20-49.

Hogeland, William. Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the US Army and the Invasion That Opened the West, (New York: FSG, 2017)

Jacobsen, Kristina M.  The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Dine Belonging, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Lambert, Valerie. “The Big Black Box of Indian Country.” American Indian Quarterly 40, no. 4 (Fall2016 2016): 333-363

Lee, Robert. “Accounting for Conquest: The Price of the Louisiana Purchase of Indian Country.” Journal Of American History 103, no. 4 (March 2017): 921-942.

Lenhardt, Corinna. “Free Peltier Now!” The Use of Internet Memes in American Indian Activism.” American Indian Culture & Research Journal 40, no. 3 (July 2016): 67-84.

Lopenzina, Drew.  Through an Indian’s Looking Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017).

Mays, Kyle T. “Community Self-Determination: American Indian Education in Chicago, 1952-2006.” History Of Education Quarterly 56, no. 4 (November 2016): 669-673.

Mihesuah, Devon A. “Diabetes in Indian Territory: Revisiting Kelly M. West’s Theory of 1940.” American Indian Culture & Research Journal 40, no. 4 (October 2016): 1-21.

Milne, George Edward. “Bondsmen, Servants, and Slaves: Social Hierarchies in the Heart of Seventeenth-Century North America.” Ethnohistory 64, no. 1 (January 2017): 115-139.

Orr, Raymond. Reservation Politics: Historical Trauma, Economic Development, and Intratribal Conflict. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017).

Precht, Jay. “Asserting Tribal Sovereignty through Compact Negotiations.” American Indian Quarterly 41, no. 1 (Witter2017 2017): 67-92.

Rifkin, Mark.  Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

Rosier, Paul C. “Great Lakes Creoles: A French-Indian Community on the Northern Borderlands, Prairie du Chien, 1750-1860.” History 102, no. 350 (April 2017): 339-340.

Schillaci, Michael A., and Steven A. Lakatos. “Refiguring the Population History of the Tewa Basin.” Kiva 82, no. 4 (December 2016): 364-386.

Sharfstein, Daniel J.  Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War, (New York: Norton, 2017).

Snyder, Christina.  Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers and Slaves in the Age of Jackson, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Starna, William A. “After the Handbook: A Perspective on 40 years of Scholarship Since the Publication of the Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15, Northeast.” New York History 98, no. 1 (Winter2017 2017): 112-146.

Steere, Benamin.  The Archaeology of Houses and Households in the Native Southeast, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017).

Stern, Jessica Yirush. The Lives of Objects: Native Americans, British Colonists, and Cultures of Labor and Exchange in the Southeast, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Tepper, Leslie Heyman Salish Blankets: Robes of Protection and Transformation, Symbols of Wealth, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).

Warren, Louis.  God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America, (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

Waselkov, Gregory A. and Marvin T. Smith. Forging Southeastern Identities: Social Archaeology, Ethnohistory and Folklore of the Mississippian to Early Historic South, (Tuscaloosa: Univesrsity of Alabama Press, 2017).

Whalen, Kevin. “Indian School, Company Town: Outing Workers from Sherman Institute at Fontana Farms Company, 1907–1930.” Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 2 (May 2017): 290-321.

White, Kevin J., Michael Galban, and Eugene R. H. Tesdahl. “La Salle on Seneca Creation, 1678.” American Indian Culture & Research Journal 40, no. 4 (October 2016): 49-69.

Wilkins, David E. Dismembered: Native Disenrollment and the Battle for Human Rights, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017).

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Current Events, Native Americans, Race and Racism, Red Lives Matter

#NativeLivesMatter

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Two important stories came across the line yesterday, and those of us who teach Native American history need to do a better job of following them.  On June 5, police officers killed Zachary Bearheels, a twenty-nine year old man with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Bearheels was punched in the head and shocked by a taser several times.  Omaha police have admitted that the officers’ conduct was a violation of departmental policy and that two of the officers involved would be terminated. 

According to the story reported on the Indian Country Today Media Network, Bearheels had been traveling from South Dakota to Oklahoma City aboard a bus. After a passenger complained about his conduct, he was kicked off and left stranded in Omaha.  Bearheels was behaving in a manner that police were called by witnesses.  He was attacked and abused by the police. Witnesses, and the internal reports of the Omaha Police Department, both indicated that Bearheels posed no threat and that the violence was entirely unjustified, and “egregious violations of the Omaha Police Department’s policy procedures and training on the use of force and the use of a taser.”

 

Bearheels’ death at the hands of the Omaha Police is one more example of the larger problem reported in a story looking at “The Police Killings No One is Talking About” that appeared In These Times. The story was written by Stephanie Woodard, and the evidence she presents is harrowing.  Police killed twenty-one Native Americans in 2016, up from 15 in 2014.  According to a 2014 study from the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice, Native Americans are more likely to be killed by police than any other demographic in the United States. Native Americans are 3.1 times more likely to be killed by the police than white Americans.

Joseph Murphy, for example, a thirty-three year old veteran of the Iraq War:  He died of a heart attack in a holding cell in a Juneau jail.  He had called for help, but guards yelled “Fuck You” and “I don’t care” in response to his pleas for medical assistance. Others were shot sitting in cars, or while holding knives, or while distraught and unwilling to listen to police demands that they comply. In nearly every case, the homicides were ruled justifiable.

And the parallels to what we have witnessed in the African-American community are clear.  Many reservation border towns are rife with racism and discrimination against native peoples.  I saw this first hand in Hardin, where I attempted to conduct interviews nearly twenty years ago. I had heard some of my Crow students describe the racism they faced at Hardin High School. I wanted to get at relations between the Crows and their white neighbors.  I was not able to immerse myself in the community deep enough to get white people to talk to me, but the problems were not hard to see there.   And in Billings, sixty miles from Crow, where I lived, and where native peoples were a despised and unwelcome minority.  Expressions of racism towards native peoples were, to me, shockingly common and public.

I have spent a large part of my career, in a sense, writing about white violence against native peoples. In my first book, I looked at the violence of the Anglo-American frontier, and the sources of the racial antipathy that took route there .  I wrote about the race wars pitting native peoples against land-hungry settlers in New England and the Chesapeake in the seventeenth centuries.  I wrote about the murder of an Algonquian weroance near Roanoke Island in 1586, and the consequences of that violent act.  In my relatively recent book on Canandaigua, I wrote about the violence on the Pennsylvania and New York frontier, where the unpunished murder of Senecas by frontier whites served as one of the major grievances American officials and Haudenosaunee diplomats needed to address.   I could teach my courses in Native American history focusing on acts of violence every day if I wished, from Roanoke to Jamestown, to Marblehead to the Lancaster Workhouse to Gnaddenhutten and Sand Creek, from Wounded Knee to Omaha and border towns throughout Native America where, too often, law enforcement officers are ending the lives of native peoples.  It is an old, old story, this, and it needs to stop.

Black Lives Matter has brought massive attention to the slaughter of African Americans at the hands of police.  The entire Black Lives Matter movement has done such important work in focusing attention on racism and discrimination and violence perpetrated by police against African Americans. At the same time, as Woodard points out, “a larger narrative is at play: racial issues in the United States tend to be framed as black and whites, while other groups are ignored.”

I plan on assigning Woodard’s piece when I teach my Indian law class again next spring, and spend some time on this issue.  Students come to college inclined to think of native peoples as being part of the past.  Their understanding of civil rights and discrimination and race relations is, as Woodard points out, too often limited to thinking in terms of matters black and white.  They can only benefit by reading closely these powerful stories, and learning that the police, in all too many instances, are viewed as a threat by the people they are supposed to protect and serve.