Tag Archives: Native American History

New Publications

What You Need to Read, March 2024

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I will get back to telling the story of the stolen lands upon which New York is built. Today, however, it is time for another edition of the quarterly bibliography I have been posting here for the past several years. Some of these books are not out yet. Some of them are too expensive for me to buy. But all of them look interesting. As always, if I have missed something, I hope you will let me know

Anderson, Scott W. Pricing the Land: The Buying and Selling of Frontier New York and the Cayuga Reservation, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024).

Beck, David R. M. Bribed with our Own Money: Federal Abuse of American Indian Funds in the Termination Era, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024).

Betke, Tyla. “’Not a Shred of Evidence’: Settler Colonial Networks of Concealment and the Birtie Indian Residential School,” Canadian Historical Review, 104 (December 2023), 519-544.

Blaakman, Michael A. Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).

Bottinger, Patrick. “Fertile Grounds: Knowledge, Ceremony, and the Intensification of Maize,” Agricultural History, 97 (November 2023), 513-546.

Brewer, Susan. The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024).

Broadwell, George Aaron and Alejandra Dubcovsky, “Chief Manuel’s 1651 Timucua Letter: The Oldest Letter in a Native Language of the United States,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 164 (November 2023), 225-267.

Brownstone, Arni. Indigenous War Painting of the Plains: An Illustrated History, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2024).

Byers, A. Martin and DeeANne Wymer, eds., Hopewell Settlement Patterns, Subsistence and Symbolic Landscapes, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2024).

Cable, John H. Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi, (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2023).

Calloway, Colin. Hard Neighbors: The Scotch-Irish Invasion of Native America and the Making of American Identity, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024).

Chase, Adrian S. Z, Arlen F. Chase, and Diane Z. Chase, eds, Ancient Mesoamerican Population History: Urbanism, Social Complexity, and Change, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2024).

Clough, Joshua. Resisting Oklahoma’s Reign of Terror: The Society of Oklahoma Indians and the Fight for Native Rights, 1923-1928, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024).

DeJong, David H. Damming the Gila: The Gila River Indian Community and the San Carlos Irrigation Project, 1900-1942, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2024).

Elliott, C. R. “’Through Death’s Wilderness’: Malaria, Seminole Environmental Knowledge, and the Florida Wars of Removal,” Ethnohistory, 71 (January 2024), 3-25.

Evans, Laure E. “The Strange Career of Federal Indian Policy: Rural Politics, Native Nations, and the Path Away from Assimilation,” Studies in American Political Development, 37 (October 2023), 89-110.

Fixico, Donald Lee. Indian Treaties in the United States: An Encyclopedia and Documents Collection, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2024).

Gone, Joseph P. “Indigenous Historical Trauma: Alter-Native Explanations for Mental Health Inequities,” Daedalus, 152 (Fall 2023), 130-150.

Hall, Ryan. “Patterns of Plunder: Corruption and the Failure of the Indian Reservation System, 1851-1887,” Western Historical Quarterly, 55 (Spring 2024), 21-38.

Harvey, Caitlin “University Land Grabs: Indigenous Dispossession and the Universities of Toronto and Manitoba,” Canadian Historical Review, 104 (December 2023), 467-493.

Jarratt-Snider, Karen and Marianne O. Nielsen, eds., Indigenous Health and Justice, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2024).

Jenkinson, Clay. “On the Future of the Doctrine of Discovery,” We Proceeded On, 49 (November 2023), 1-53.

Kidder, William L. Defending Fort Stanwix: A Story of the New York Frontier in the American Revolution, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024).

Klann, Mary. Wardship and the Welfare State: Native Americans and the Formation of First-Class Citizenship in Mid-Twentieth Century America, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024).

Lloyd, Dana. Land is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites, (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2023).

Lowery, Melinda Maynor and Christina Snyder, “The Native South and Eleventh-Hour History: Reconceptualizing Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 81 (January 2024), 103-114.

McCreary, Tyler and Rebecca Hall. “The Healer, the Witch and the Law: The Settler Magic that Criminalized Indigenous Medicine Men as Fraud and Normalized Colonial Violence as Care,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 114 (2024), 352-368.

Martinez, David. “A City Upon Stolen Land: Westward Expansion, Indigenous Intellectuals, and the Origin of Resistance,” Journal of the Early Republic, 43 (Winter 2023), 607-617.

Morelock, Jerry. “Custer’s Last Decision,” MHQ: Quarterly Journal of Military History, 36 (Winter 2024), 38-47.

Morman, Todd Allin. Many Nations Under Many Gods: Public Land Management and American Indian Sacred Sites, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2024).

Moves Camp, Richard. My Grand-Father’s Altar: Five Generations of Lakota Holy Men, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024).

Owens, Robet M. “Field of Corpses: Arthur St Clair and the Death of an American Army,” Indiana Magazine of History, 120 (March 2024).

Owens, Robert M. Killing Over Land: Murder and Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2024).

Parmenter, Jon. “Confronting Cornell University’s Origins in Indigenous Dispossession,” William and Mary Quarterly, 81 (January 2024), 123-124.

Peach, Steven. Rivers of Power: Creek Political Culture in the Native South, 1750-1815, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2024).

Perez, Erika.  “Voices from California: Spanish-Mexican and Indigenous Women’s Interventions on Empire and Manifest Destiny,” Journal of the Early Republic, 43 (Winter 2023), 659-668.

Rakita, Gordon F. M and Maria Cecilia Lozada, Exploring Ontologies of the Precontact Americas: From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2024).

Randolph, Ned. Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta: A Call for Reclamation, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024).

Stevenson, Christopher, Madeleine Gunter-Bassett, Laure Dussubieux, “Exploring the Seventeenth-Century Copper Trade: An Analysis of Smelted Copper from Sites in Virginia and North Carolina,” American Antiquity, 89 (January 2024), 119-132.

Van Last, Emily C. and Carlton Shield Chief Gover, Indigenizing Archaeology: Putting Theory into Practice, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2024).

Varley, Molly K. Americans Recaptured: Progressive Era Memory of Frontier Captivity, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2024).

Wheeler, Winona, et. al., The Indigenous Oral History Manual, (New York: Routledge, 2024).

Winkler, Albert. “The Fetterman Disaster: A Swiss-American Officer Leads His Men to Disaster,” Swiss American Historical Society Review, 60 (February 2024), 1-83.

Native American Bibliography, New Publications

What You Need to Read, December 2023

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The fall semester has come to a close. There is a brief respite between the madness of the holidays and the beginning of the spring semester to take stock, see what is out there, and decide what to place on the reading list. As always, each quarter I can find plenty of stuff that interests me. I hope you find some interest in what is included here, and if I have missed something you think should be on the list, please let me know.

Abram, Susan. “Chess, Not Checkers: The Complexities of Historic Creek Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History, 47 (November 2023), 890-893.

Allread, W. Tanner. “The Specter of Indian Removal: The Persistence of State Supremacy Arguments in Federal Indian Law,” Columbia Law Review, 123 (October 2023), 1533-1610.

Archer, Seth. “Vaccination, Dispossession and the Indigenous Interior,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 97 (Summer 2023), 255-293.

Carlos, Ann M. “They Country They Built: Dynamic and Complex Indigenous Economies in North America before 1492,” Journal of Economic History, 83 (June 2023), 319-358.

Cooke, Jason: “Savagery Repositioned: Historicizing the Cherokee Nation,” American Indian Quarterly, 47 (Spring 2023).

Dorries, Heather and Michelle Daigle, Land Back: Relational Landscapes of Indigenous Resistance Across the Americas, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024).

Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).

Dwider, Maraam A. and Kathleen Marchetti, “Tribal Coalitions and Lobbying Outcomes: Evidence from Administrative Rulemaking,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 53 (September 2023), 354-382.

Evans, Laura E. “The Strange Career of Federal Indian Policy: Rural Politics, Native Nations, and the Path Away from Assimilation,” Studies in American Political Development, 27 (October 2023), 89-110.

Fitz, Caitlin. “The Monroe Doctrine and the Indigenous Americas,” Diplomatic History, 47 (November 2023), 802-822.

Fixico, Donald L. “That’s What They Used to Say’: Reflections on American Indian Oral Traditions, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023).

Foxworth, Raymond, and Carew Boulding, “How Race, Resentment, and Ideology Shape Attitudes about Native American Inherent Rights and Policy Issues,” Political Research Quarterly, 76 (December 2023), 1843-1856.

Goeman, Mishauna. Settler Aesthetics: Visualizing the Spectacle of Originary Moments in The New World, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

Gone, Joseph P. “Indigenous Historical Trauma: Alter-Native Explanations for Mental Health Inequities,” Daedalus, 152 (Fall 2023), 130-150.

Gonzalez, Michael. “The Enduring Flame: Stress, Epigenetics, and the California Indian, 1769-2000,” American Indian Quarterly, 46 (Fall 2022).

Haefeli, Evan. “The Great Haudenosaunee-Lenape Peace of 1669: Oral Traditions, Colonial Records, and the Origin of Delaware’s Status as Women,” New York History, 104 (Summer 2023), 79-95.

Harris, Craig. Rise Up! Indigenous Music in North America, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

John, Randy H. and Alicia Puglionesi, “The Most Valuable Lands: Seneca Oil, Seneca’s Oil, and the Struggle for Land Rights at the Birthplace of an Industry,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal,  46 (no. 2, 2023), 1-28.

Johnson, Tai Elizabeth. “The Shifting Nature of Subsistence on the Hopi Indian Reservation,” Agricultural History, 97 (April 2023), 215-244.

Kantrowitz, Stephen. Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023).

Kenmille, Agnes Oshanee. Agnes Oshanee Kenmille: Salish Indian Elder and Craftswoman, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

Krupat, Arnold. From the Boarding Schools: Apache Students Speak, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

Lee, Wayne E. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023).

Leroux, Darryl, “State Recognition and the Dangers of Race Shifting: The Case of Vermont,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 46 (No. 2, 2023), 53-84.

Lloyd, Dana. “Haaland v Brackeen and the Logic of Discovery,” U.S. Catholic Historian, 41 (Summer 2023), 95-115.

Marshall, Stuart. “Dividing the Carolinas: Indians, Colonists and Slaves in the Prerevolutionary Boundary Dispute, 1763-1773,” Early American Studies, 21 (Winter 2023), 42-86.

May, Roy H., “’I Did Get Along with the Indians’: Joseph Hugo Wenberg, Missionary to the Aymara, Ponca, and Oneida, 1901-1950,” Methodist History, 61 (no. 1, 2023), 22-34.

McCutchen, Jennifer Monrie. “’They Will Know in the End that We are Men’: Gunpowder and Gendered Discourse in Creek-British Diplomacy, 1763-1776,” Ethnohistory, 70 (July 2023).

Midtrød, Tom Arne. “’A People Before Useless’: Ethic Cleansing in the Wartime Hudson Valley, 1754-1763,” Early American Studies, 21 (Summer 2023), 428-459.

Miron, Rose. Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024).

Murray, Laura J. “’We are the Ones that Make the Treaty’: Michi Saagiig Lands and Islands in Southeastern Ontario,” Ethnohistory, 70 (July 2023).

Olson, Greg. “A ‘Rebellious District and Dangerous Locality’: Cherokee Soldiers and Refugees in Neosho, Missouri, 1862-1863,” Missouri Historical Review, 117 (July 2023), 235-253.

Peterson, Anna “’A Desire to Learn’: Native American Experiences in Lutheran Colleges, 1945-1955,” American Indian Quarterly, 47 (Winter 2023), 26-69.

Riggs, Brett H. “The Return of Standing Wolf,” North Carolina Historical Review, 100 (April 2023), 157-187.

Shannon, Timothy J. “In the Bushes: The Secret History of Anglo-Iroquois Treaty Making,” New York History, 104 (Summer 2023), 53-78.

Shrake, Peter. “Stambaugh’s Treaty,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, 106 (Spring 2023), 24-37.

Smith, Lindsey Claire. Urban Homelands: Writing the Native City from Oklahoma, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

Stockel, H. Henrietta. Salvation Through Slavery: Chiracahua APaches and Priests on the Spanish Colonial Frontier, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2023).

Theobald, Brianna, “Dobbs in Historical Context: The View from Indian Country,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 97 (Spring 2023), 39-47.

Van de Logt, Mark. Between the Floods: A History of the Arikaras, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023).

Vigil, Kiara. “Language, Water, Dance: An Indigenous Meditation on Time,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 44 (no. 1, 2023), 168-182.

Voigt, Matthias Andre. “Warrior Women: Indigenous Women, Gender Relations, and Sexual Politics within the American Indian Movement and at Wounded Knee,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 46 (no. 3, 2023), 101-130.

New Publications

What You Need to Read, September 2023

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I hope this finds you well. Classes have begun at Geneseo, the students are back on campus, and now it is time to begin balancing all the tasks facing the college professor.  This is your quarterly installment of “Things You Need to Read.” Hope you find this helpful.  As always, if I have missed anything, please do not hesitate to let me know about that.

Aune, Stefan. Indian Wars Everywhere: Colonial Violence and the Shadow Doctrines of Empire, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023).

Brown, Hana E. “Administrative Burden and the Reproduction of Settler Colonialism: A Cast Study of the Indian Child Welfare Act,” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 9 (September 2023), 232-251.

Carlose, Ann M. “The Country They Built: Dynamic and Complex Indigenous Economies in North America before 1492,” Journal of Economic History, 83 (June 2023), 319-358.

Collar, Amanda. “Indigenous Peoples’ Limited Access to Reproductive Care,” Annals of Internal Medicine, March 2023.

DasSarma, Anjali and Lindford D. Fisher, “The Persistence of Indigenous Unfreedom in Early American Newspaper Advertisements, 1704-1804,” Slavery and Abolition, 44 (June 2023), 267-291.

Davis, Elisabeth. “’Any Violation of this Arrangement’: Catholic Negotiations at the Carlisle Indian School, 1883-1918,” Pennsylvania History, 90 (Summer 2023), 321-443.

Dwider, Maraam A and Kathleen Marchetti, “Tribal Coalitions and Lobbying Outcomes: Evidence from Administrative Rulemaking,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 53 (September 2023), 354-392.

Edmunds, R. David. Voices in the Drum: Narratives from the Native American Past, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023).

Friedman, Joseph, Helena Hansen and Joseph P. Gone. “Deaths of Despair and Indigenous Data Genocide,” The Lancet, 401 (March 2023).

Glancy, Diane and Linda Rodriguez, eds., Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

Hoagland, Serra J. and Albert Steven, Wildlife Stewardship on Tribal Lands: Our Place is in Our Soul, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023).

Keeler, Kasey R. American Indians and the American Dream: Policies, Place and Property in Minnesota, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023).

Kiser, William S. “The Business of Killing Indians: Contract Warfare and Genocide in the U.S-Mexico Borderlands,” Journal of American History, ## (June 2023), 15-39.

Krupat, Arnold. “The Wheelocks and the Clouds at Odds: Some Differences Among Red Progressives in the Early Twentieth Century,” American Indian Quarterly, 46 (Fall 2022).

Leroux, Darryl, “State Recognition and the Dangers of Race Shifting,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 46 (no. 2, 2023), 53-84.

Mauro, Hayes Peter. The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2023).

Midtrød, Tom Arne. “’A People Before Useless’: Ethnic Cleansing in the Wartime Hudson Valley, 1754-1763.” Early American Studies, 21 (Summer 2023), 428-459.

Monnett, John H. “The Collapse of Cheyenne Supremacy on the Central Plains,” Nebraska History, 104 (Fall 2023), 128-145.

Olson, Greg. “A ‘Rebellious District and Dangerous Locality’: Cherokee Soldiers and Refugees in Neosho, Missouri, 1862-1863,” Missouri Historical Review, 117 (July 2023), 235-253.

Parins, James W. Literacy and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820-1906, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023).

Peyton, John T. “’The Land We Have We Wish To Keep’: Miami Autonomy and Resistance to Removal in Indiana, 1812-1826,” Indiana Magazine of History, 119 (June 2023), 139-176.

Schmader, Matthew F. “Pueblo Resistance and Inter-Ethnic Conflict: The 1540-1542 Vazques de Coronado Expedition to the Middle Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico,” Kiva, 89 (June 2023), 167-191.

Stockel, H. Henrietta. Salvation Through Slavery: Chiricahua Apaches and Priests on the Spanish Colonial Frontier, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2022).

Toups, Eric. “Indian Men and French ‘Women’: Fragile Masculinity and Fragile Alliances in Colonial Louisiana, 1699-1741,” Early American Studies, 21 (Summer 2023), 353-379.

Treuer, Anton. Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians but were Afraid to Ask, (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2023).

Van de Logt, Mark. Between the Floods: A History of the Arikaras, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023).

van Deusen, Nancy E. “In the Tethered Shadow: Native American Slavery, African Slavery, and the Disappearance of the Past,” William and Mary Quarterly, 80 (April 2023), 355-388.

Van Gorder, Megan. “Uncovering Comparative Indigenous Inquiries at the Homewood Boarding School in Peoria County,” Illinois Heritage, 26 (July/August 2023), 11-12.

Teaching Native American History

History 261, Native American History, Fall 2023

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It has been several years since I’ve taught the Native American history survey course at Geneseo, and at the end of this month, I will be teaching it for the first time with the new edition of the textbook Peter Olsen-Harbich and I published last fall. As I have mentioned in earlier posts on this blog, I no longer give grades on student assignments. Drawing inspiration from the teaching of Cate Denial at Knox College, I develop a rubric in collaboration with the students. In meetings at the end of the semester, and with reference to this rubric and the extensive comments and suggestions I will have written on the students’ work, students assign themselves a grade for the course. Usually, about half the students enrolled in the course are history majors, and the rest enroll to fulfill some part of the general education requirements, which have recently undergone a thorough revision at Geneseo. Any questions or criticisms, please let me know in the comments below. I am aware of the funky formatting below, but I have not been able to figure out an efficient way to make what I have included below look like the document that I will make available to the students on the college’s clunky learning management system.

History 261                         American Indian History                               Fall 2023

Instructor: Michael Oberg                                                                              Meeting Times: MW, 10:30-12:10, Newton 21 Office Hours: MW 12:30-1:45                                                           EMAIL:  oberg@geneseo.ed Phone: (585)245-5730 (office) Website and blog: www.michaelleroyoberg.com The website and blog are designed to complement the textbook. There is a review section for each chapter of the textbook.  Click on the “Manual.”

  • Required Readings:   
  • Michael Leroy Oberg and Peter Jakob Olsen-Harbich, Native America: A History,    3d. ed., 2022.  
  • Colin G. Calloway, ed., Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indian Views of How the West Was Lost, 2d. ed., 2017.
  • Frederick E. Hoxie, Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era, 2001.
  • Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3d ed, 2000.                                            
  • Additional Documents and Articles available on JSTOR and as noted below.

Course Description:  This course surveys the history of Native Americans in the region that ultimately became the United States.  It traces the effects and consequences of the European “Invasion of America,” analyzes changes in and among native cultures in response to the arrival of Europeans, as well as native responses, resistance, and accommodation to European colonization.  We will examine the role of Native Americans as players in the intercultural, imperial politics of the Colonial Period, their    involvement in the American Revolution, and their response to the westward expansion of   Anglo-American settlement in the decades after the American Revolution.  We also will explore the historical background of the problems, issues, and challenges facing Indians in contemporary American society, and, in outline, the challenges posed to native peoples by Settler Colonialism. We will discuss the genocide that Indigenous peoples experienced and survived.          

Participation: In my view participation is more than attendance. I expect you to arrive at each class meeting with the readings completed and that you will be ready to discuss what you hare read. This is not a lecture course, and your contribution to our discussions is an important part of the learning experience. Though participation is more than attendance, attendance is critically important.   As you will see from the attached grading agreement, after four unexcused absences you will not be able to earn any grade higher than a D for the course. If, for some reason, you are unable to attend a class, please let me know in advance.

            Writing Assignments:  On two occasions over the semester, I will read your journals.You will write each week on short topics I assign you, but also on current events and on  any outside reading you choose to do.  I will provide you with these writing prompts in class.

I will also assign two short take home writing assignments, of no more than 1500 words in length. I will pose for you a number of broad questions that will force you to consider widely what you have read to that point in the semester, develop an argument and an effective answer, and to present that answer in writing with grace and style. 

With any of these assignments, I encourage you to let me know if you have any questions.  You should be clear on what I expect of you before you complete an assignment. Please use office hours, and if you cannot make these make an appointment to see me. I want to encourage you to ask for assistance and advice with your assignments.

I will write extensive comments in your journals and essays.  I will also make comments on these papers about your class participation.  I will ask you challenging questions, offer what I hope you will view as constructive criticism, and encourage you to push yourself as a writer and a thinker. But I will not give you grades, in the traditional sense, on this work.

I want you to benefit from this course. On the date of our first class meeting, we will discuss the standards for the class.  You and I will work together to arrive at a set of expectations for the sort of work that will earn a specific grade.   In your final journal, and in individual meetings or phone calls scheduled during Finals Week, we will discuss how well you think you did in meeting the agreed upon standards, and what your grade for the course ought to be. 

Discussion Schedule

28 August        Introduction to the Course

Reading:  Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, Introduction, Chapter One.

30 August        The Columbian Encounter                                                                

Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 23-32; Columbus’s Letter to Ferdinand and Isabella, 1493; The Requerimiento;

Also, have a look at the Re-Envisioning Greater Cahokia Story Map. Students interested in Native American languages might look briefly at the materials placed online by the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island.  

6 September    When Indians Discovered Europe

Reading: Harriot, Brief and True Report  and John White Paintings of Algonquians on the Outer Banks.            

11 September  The Shatter Zone

Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 33-44;  Some images from John Smith’s Generall Historie are available here; Take a good look at John Smith’s Map of Virginia as well. Also, read the poem from Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony  available here. For students who have the time and some familiarity with Disney’s “Pocahontas,” I encourage you to take a look at “Missing Mataoka,” which includes an alternative audio track to be played as you watch the Disney film.  Take a few minutes to read John Rolfe’s letter to Sir Thomas Dale, justifying his decision to marry Pocahontas.

13 September  The Shatter Zone, Continued.                                        Reading: Oberg and Olsen Harbich, Native America, 49-59; Treaty of Middle Plantation (1677). Please read as much as you can of John Eliot’s Tears of Repentance, a history of his efforts to bring Christianity to Indigenous peoples in southern New England.

18 September The Iroquois League and Confederacy. 

Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native American, 44-49, 59-79;Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly, 40 (October 1983), 528-559 (Please locate this article on JSTOR, download a copy of it, and makes sure you have a copy with you on your computer for our discussion. If you are unfamiliar with JSTOR, please ask for assistance. Look on the library webpage and click on databases). One of the most important primary sources used by Professor Richter in this well known essay was a collection of writings by French Missionaries to New France known as The Jesuit Relations.  You may follow this link to the Relations. I would like you to check Professor Richter’s sources occasionally, and look at how he uses his evidence.

20 September Life Behind the Frontier

Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 80-98; Samson Occom, “Short Narrative;” “The Confession of Samuel Ashbo of Mohegan” and Temperance Hannibal’s Narrative, dated 7 February 1754. 

25 September  Native Americans and the Wars of the Eighteenth Century                 Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 98-109; Proclamation of 1763.

27 September  The American Revolution Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 110-129; Michael Oberg, “What’s So Great About the American Revolution?” and “No Mercy.”

2 October        What Do We Make of the Revolution and Native Americans?                        Reading:  Jeffrey Ostler, “’To Extirpate the Indians’: An Indigenous Consciousness  of Genocide in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes, 1750s-1810,” William and  Mary Quarterly, 72 (October 2015), 587-622 (JSTOR)

4 October        Indians and the New American Empire               Prophets of the Republic                       Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, pp. 129-157; Prucha, Documents no. 1-21.

11 October    Native Peoples and Long Knives                                Reading:  David A. Silverman, “The Curse of God: An Idea and its Origins among the Indians of New York’s Revolutionary Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 66 (2009): 495-534 (JSTOR).

First Paper Due

16 October      The Mechanics of Dispossession: Or, How Chenussio Became Geneseo               Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 157-161; Prucha, Documents, Document no. 27, 29-34, 36-38; 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua; 1797 Treaty of Big Tree; Oberg, “The Treaty of Big Tree: Let’s Follow the Money”; and “Chenussio: The Indigenous History of Livingston County.”

18 October      The Removal Crisis                                                                   Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, pp. 162-174; Prucha, Documents, 39-45, 50.

                        First Journal Due

23 October      The Indians’ West                                                               Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 175-190; Calloway, Hearts, Introduction, Chapters 1-4.

25 October      The Indians’ West, Continued                                        Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, pp. 190-204; Prucha, Documents, nos., 51-66; Calloway, Hearts, Chapter 5; Angela Cavender Wilson (Waziyatawin), “Grandmother to Granddaughter: Generations of Oral History in a Dakota Family,” 20 (Winter 1996), 7-13 (JSTOR).

30 October      The Plains Wars: Concentration and Enforcement    Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 204-214; Prucha, Documents, 67-81, 83-85; Calloway, Hearts, Chapters 6-8.

1  November   Reformers and the Indian Problem                                Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, pp. 215-227; Prucha, Documents, no. 82, 97-98, 101-102, 104, 124; Hoxie, Talking Back, Introduction; Calloway, Hearts, Chapters 9-10.

6 November    Wounded Knee Reading: Black Elk Speaks, (excerpt, available here); And this website based on Historian Justin Gage’s We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us. (Take some time to understand Gage’s argument about the Ghost Dance movement and its consequences.

8 November    The Nation’s Wards                                                                                  Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 227-247, Prucha, Documents, nos., 105-112, 117-118, 120-123, 125-129, 132-134, 137; Calloway, Hearts, Chapters 11-12; Hoxie, Talking Back, Ch. 1-3.

13 November  The Boarding School Experience                       Reading: The Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center

15 November  The Search for American Indian Identity                    Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, pp. 247-263; Prucha, Documents, nos. 136, 138-144; Hoxie, Talking Back, Chapters 4-7, Afterword.

20 November  From Termination to Self-Determination                 Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, pp. 263–275; Prucha, Documents, nos. 145, 147-149, 151-160, 162-163

27 November  The War on Native American Families. Reading: Magaret Jacobs, “Remembering the ‘Forgotten Child’: The American Indian Child Welfare Crisis of the 1960s and 1970s,” American Indian Quarterly, 37 (Spring 2013), 136-159; Oberg, “Texas is Making Me Crazy.”

29 November  The Struggle for Sovereignty:  1978                                        Reading: Prucha, Documents, nos. 167, 169-187; Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 275-284;

4 December    Native America in the Era of Self-Determination Reading: Oberg, Native America, Chapter 10; Prucha, 189-190, 201, 204, 207, 210-211.

Second Journal Due

6 December    Native Nations and the Supreme Court in the 21st Century Reading:  McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020); Halland v. Brackeen (2023) (read Gorsuch’s concurrence and Thomas dissent).

11 December  Final Class Meeting: Where Do We Go From Here? Reading: Oberg, “The Trump Administration and American Indian Policy: A Post-Mortem” and Michael Oberg and Joel Helfrich, “Why Deb Haaland Matters.”

14 December  Final Writing Assignment Due, 8:00AM

18 December Meetings to Discuss Final Grades

Current Events

The Gag Order Party

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If you have not read the Penn America Center report on “Educational Gag-Orders,” you really ought to. Although the focus of state legislation described in the report rests on teaching about gender, sexuality, and Critical Race Theory, the language in the bills could have an impact on teaching and learning about Native America. Because so much of this legislation originates in Red States with rich Native American histories, the Penn America Center report is a sobering read.

            Each of the bills examined in the report “represents an effort to impose content- and viewpoint-based censorship.” They send the signal, the report argues, “that specific ideas, arguments, theories, and opinions may not be tolerated by the government.” Twenty-six of the bills “explicitly apply to colleges and universities.” Six of the bills failed, three have become law, and the remainder are making their way through the legislative process. Many of them prevent teaching that includes “CRT” and information presented in work like the 1619 Project. Some bills propose to eliminate tenure to ensure that instructors do not teach their students ideas and content that legislators find subversive or dangerous.

            A South Carolina bill, HB 3827, offers an alarming example. The legislation outlaws promoting or endorsing narratives that “the United States was founded for the purpose of oppression, that the American Revolution was fought for the purpose of protecting oppression, or that United States history is a story defined by oppression; or (ii) with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality”

            This is pretty rich from the state that fired the shots that began the Civil War.

            Think about this for a second.  How might an instructor in South Carolina tell her students about the “3/5 Compromise,” which counted each enslaved person as 60% of a human being, and gave slave states more representation in Congress, more electoral votes, and thus control of the national government? How might one teach the history of the Nullification Crisis without doing an entire injustice to American History? Or Secession, and the arguments that slavers made in favor of leaving the Union.  When I taught the America survey, my students read Charles Dew’s brief but incredible book, Apostles of Disunion. Secessionists are condemned by their own racist speech, their own frequently-voiced arguments that the Founders created a republic with white men in charge, and that white supremacy was worth fighting and dying for. But under this proposed legislation? A dutiful teacher might assert that South Carolinians were standing up for their state’s rights. But their right to do what?  Imagine, if you will, that you see your next-door neighbor packing up the car.  He is leaving his wife.  You are stunned. They seemed like such a wonderful couple. They had been together for ever, it seemed, close to four score and five years. Stunned, you ask what happened.  Your neighbor tells you he is leaving because he has the right to do so.  Nobody will find that a satisfactory answer. But that is what South Carolina’s legislators are contemplating.  Steer clear of controversial subjects.  Do not indoctrinate students.  Deny the racism of the past. Pretend it did not exist. Indeed, teach nothing that could make a student, somehow, feel ashamed of their race. Don’t talk about the gibbets in Charlestown, the trade in Cherokee scalps, and enslavement, which cuts to the marrow of South Carolina’s history.  Don’t talk about Nullification and John C. Calhoun and his views of the Constitution.  Don’t talk about Fort Sumter, and the Palmetto State’s embrace of lynching.  Lie to your students.  Tell them nothing that will upset their frightened parents.  Lie to them, and lie some more.  It is all good.  It is all progress. Conservative White South Carolinians are good people who need to hear that, over and over, it seems.  It is a message they will drill into the skulls of their children.  These lawmakers are so fragile and frightened that those who refuse to toe the line can expect termination.   Or worse.

Teaching Native American History

Indigenous Law and Public Policy, Spring 2023

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I have not taught one of my two favorite courses in person in quite a while. I was on sabbatical last spring, and I taught an online version in the Spring of 2021. I have posted the syllabus here to share recent updates to the course, but also to solicit suggestions and advice. I would like to broaden the focus, or develop a similar course that explores similar issues as they are discussed and analyzed in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Before the pandemic, I was well advanced in planning a study-abroad course for Sydney that would allow students and me to learn on the ground in Australia. Please, feel free to share your expertise. I would love to hear your thoughts. I apologize in advance for any gloopiness in the formatting: copying the Word File into this website makes for some awkward transfers some times.

History 262    Indigenous Law and Public Policy               Spring 2023

Professor: Michael Oberg

Meetings:   MW, 8:30-10:10, Welles 131

Office Hours:  Wednesday, 10:15-12:00, Doty 208

Roughly every week or so I post to my blog on matters related to the teaching and writing of Native American history.  You are welcome to follow along.

Required Readings:

Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier, (2005)

Daniel Cobb, Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887, (2015).

Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America, (2015)

Luke Lassiter, Clyde Ellis, and Ralph Kotay, The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, and Indian Hymns, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002)

Readings online.

News Articles in online news sources like indianz.com and other online sources.

Court cases and documents as per syllabus.

Recommended Podcasts and other media:

            Wind River (Motion Picture)

            This Land, Seasons 1 and 2.

            Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo.

            Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s

            Stolen: The Search for Jermaine

            5-4: Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta

            5-4: Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl

Course Description:   This course will provide you with an overview of the concept of American Indian tribal sovereignty, nationhood, and the many ways in which discussions of sovereignty and right influence the status of American Indian nations.  We will look at the historical development and evolution of the concept of sovereignty, the understandings of sovereignty held by native peoples, and how non-Indians have confronted assertions of sovereignty from native peoples.  We will also examine current conditions in Native America, and look at the historical development of the challenges facing native peoples and native nations in the 21st century.  This course is required for the Native American Studies Minor, and counts for the following Core attributes:

                        Diversity, Equity, Inclusion

                        Diversity, Pluralism, Power

                        Humanities

A Note on Grading:  Your work this semester will consist of Participation, Journals, and a Final Paper.

1). Participation is much more than attendance. I view my courses fundamentally as extended conversations and these conversations can only succeed when each person pulls his or her share of the load.  You should plan to show up for class with the reading not just “done” but understood; you should plan not just to “talk” but to engage critically and constructively with your classmates.  Our conversations will depend on your thoughtful inquiry and respectful exchange.  We are all here to learn, and I encourage you to join in the discussion with this in mind.  Obviously, you must be present to participate. Please have all assigned readings available when we meet. The reading load in this course is quite heavy. It will challenge you to keep up. If you have trouble with the reading, please let me know.  You obviously will be able to participate in classes with the most success when you complete the reading.

2). Journals: On seven occasions during the semester I will read your journals.  I want you to think about what you are reading and I want you to write about that experience. You will submit your journals on Brightspace. You should plan on writing a minimum of 300 words a week. DO NOT SUMMARIZE OUR CLASS DISCUSSIONS.  DO NOT SUMMARIZE THE READINGS. I hope you will take this assignment as an opportunity to reflect upon what you are reading in class and in terms of current events, to discuss the things you wish that we had a chance to discuss in class, or to say what you wanted to say during one of our class meetings.  Show me that you are thinking about the material we cover in our readings and in the classroom.  Show me that you are keeping up with current events in Indian Country. Use the journals as an opportunity to educate yourself on issues in Native America that matter to you. Read the news on INDIANZ.COM,  National Native News, Native News Online, Indian Country Today, and CBC Indigenous for Canada, and the National Indigenous Times for Australia. I will also tweet out stories that I find of interest under the hashtag #HIST262MLO.  In addition, I would like you to follow news on one Native Nation.  You can set up a news alert on Google News, and stories will appear in your inbox whenever they occur. You can find a list of federally recognized Indian Nations here.  Some Indigenous nations receive more coverage than others.

Final Paper: Your paper should be approximately 15 pages in length.  You will take the role of an adviser to a new President.  Your assignment is to advise this President on Indian policy.  In your paper you will do the following:

1). Identify what you see as a major problem or problems in Native America today that you believe the President should tackle during her or his administration.

2). Explain briefly the historical origins of this problem and how and why previous solutions have either failed to address it or ignored it entirely.

3. Offer a thoughtful, plausible, and realistic path towards solving this problem, and       justify it legally and constitutionally.

4. Have at least 30 sources in a thorough bibliography that includes each of the following: news articles, government documents, reports from agencies working with indigenous peoples, and works by scholars who study these issues published in academic journals and books.

5. Format the paper according to the guidelines spelled out in the Turabian Manual. Write the paper with careful attention to grammar, style and substance.     

With any of these assignments, I encourage you to visit with me during office hours if you have any questions.  You should be clear on what I expect from you before you complete an assignment.  The door is open.  If you cannot make it to my office hours, please feel free to contact me by email and we will find another time. Many questions can be answered and problems addressed more effectively in person during office hours than by email.

I will write extensive comments on your written work.  I will ask you challenging questions, offer what I hope you will view as constructive criticism, and encourage you to push yourself as a writer and a thinker. But I will not give you grades, in the traditional sense, on this work. I want you to benefit from this course. On the date of our first class meeting, we will discuss the standards for the class.  You and I will work together to arrive at a set of expectations for the sort of work that will earn a specific grade.   In your final journal, and in individual meetings scheduled during Finals Week, we will discuss how well you think you did in meeting the agreed upon standards, and what your grade for the course ought to be. A proposed grading framework can be found, below.

A Note on COVID-19: We will be working together during a continuing global pandemic. Though the pandemic has slowed considerably, there is still reason to be careful. These remain trying times.  That you may feel stressed and anxious over the course of the semester is not surprising at all.  Your health is important.  The health of the people who matter to you is important. If the pandemic is posing a challenge to you doing the assigned work, please feel free to let me know.  I encourage you to ask for help if you need it. Stay in touch.

A Note on Phones: I ask that all cellphones be stored during the entirety of our class meeting.  If you expect an important call that just cannot wait, please inform me before class. Otherwise, I expect you to refrain from using your cellphone and I expect you to keep it out of sight. Please be present in mind and body.

Discussion and Reading Schedule

25 January       Introduction to the Course

The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Banner, How, Introduction, Chapter 1; The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).    

30 January       Native Nations in the United States

                        How to Read a Supreme Court Case

Reading: Articles of Confederation, Article IX; United States Constitution; Northwest Ordinance  (1787); Federal Trade and Intercourse Act (1790); Treaty of Canandaigua (1794); Banner, How, Chapters 1-3

1 February       The Marshall Court and the Definition of Native Nations

Reading: Johnson v. McIntosh (1823); Banner, How, Chapters 4 and 5. If you are interested in a comparative perspective, I encourage you to look at Stuart Banner’s article, “Why Terra Nullius? Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia,” Law and History Review, 23 (Spring 2005), 95-131, available on Brightspace.

6 February       The Expulsion Era

Reading: Documents on Jacksonian Indian policy (Brightspace); Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831); Samuel A. Worcester v. State of Georgia, (1832); Banner, How, Chapter 6.

Journal 1 Due.

 8 February      The Reservation System

Reading: Ex Parte Crow Dog; Major Crimes Act (1885) and US v. Kagama  (1886); Banner, How, Chapter 7.

13 February     The Policy of Allotment

Reading: Cobb, Nations, pp. 19-49; Banner, How, Chapter 8;Talton v. Mayes (1896); Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903); United States v. Celestine (1909)

15 February     The Indian New Deal

Reading: Reading: Cobb, Nations, pp. 54-93; Banner,  How, (finish book) and the Indian Reorganization Act,  1934.

20 February     The Termination Era

Reading: Cobb, Nations, pp. 97-106, 115-123; HCR 108; Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States (1955).

Journal 2 Due

22 February     Williams v. Lee and the Modern Era of American Indian Tribal Sovereignty

Reading: Williams v. Lee (1959); Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal  Council (1959).

27 February     The Era of Self-Determination

Reading: McClanahan v. Arizona Tax Commission, (1973); Morton v. Mancari (1974).

 1 March          Red Power

Reading: Cobb, Nations, 124-188

 6 March          The Supreme Court’s 1978 Term, Congress and Tribal Sovereignty

Reading: US. v. Wheeler (1978); Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (1978); Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe (1978); Legislative Packet (Brightspace)

Journal 3 Due.

8 March           The Power of Tribal Governments

Reading: Merrion v. Jicarilla Apache Tribe (1982); Duro v. Reina, (1990); Atkinson Trading Company v. Shirley (2001); US v. Lara (2004)

20 March         The War on Native American Children and Families

Reading:  Adoptive Couple v Baby Girl (2013) (this was a messy case, with two concurring and two dissenting opinions); 5-4 Podcast on the Adoptive Couple case; Margaret Jacobs, “Remembering the ‘Forgotten Child’: The American Indian Child Welfare Crisis of the 1960s and 1970s,” American Indian Quarterly 37 (Winter/Spring 2013), 136-159 (Brightspace); Olivia Stefanovich, “2023 Will Be a Pivotal Year for Indigenous Child Welfare on Both Sides of the Border,” CBC News, 2 January 2023. The Cherokee Phoenix produced its own 42-minute long breakdown of the case, if you are interested in Native American reactions to Brackeen.

This would be a good time to listen to Season 2 of the “This Land” podcast hosted by Rebecca Nagel

Journal 4 Due

22 March         Jurisdiction and Sovereignty in the 21st Century

Reading: McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020); Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, (2022). Listen to 5-4 Podcast episode on the Castro-Huerta decision.

27 March         Sexual Violence in Indian Country

Reading: Deer, Rape.  We will discuss the book in its entirety.  You will want to begin reading

29 March         #MMIW #MMIWG

Reading:  Watch this advertisement from the Native Women’s Wilderness, and this one from the United States Office of Justice Programs/Office for Victims of Crimes; Absorb as much of the following as you can: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls, (Seattle: Urban Indian Health Institute, 2017); a PBS NewsHour report featuring Abigail HenHawk, who oversaw the Urban Indian Health Institute report; National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.  (Explore the website, read the summary of the 2019 Final Report); the report from the Trump Administration’s “Operation Lady Justice”; and President Biden’s Executive Order 14053 from November of 2021.

Search on Twitter using the hashtags #MMIW and #MMIWG.  The podcast on the disappearance of Jermain Charlo would fit well here. Give it a listen.

3 April              Issues in American Indian Religion: Christianity in Indian Country

Reading: Lassiter, Ellis and Kotay, The Jesus Road, (entire book).

5 April             Issues in American Indian Religion 

Reading: Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith (1990); Lyng v. Northwest Cemetery Protective Association (1988).  Please watch on your own “The Silence,” a PBS documentary on one small Catholic Church in Alaska.

                        Journal 5 Due

10 April           Issues in American Indian Education: Boarding Schools and their Legacy

Reading:  Gord Downie, “The Secret Path.”  I would also like you to go to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School online project.  You can find the website here.  Your assignment is, first, to read Louise NoHeart’s student file (Brightspace) and then to read a minimum of at least 5 student files from the Indigenous Nation you have been following this semester (or a related Nation)(Ask for help if you are not clear on how to do this!) In general, for each student there is an information card and a student file. Read both of those and search for the student’s name in the newspapers and other documents.  What do you learn about those students’ experiences at Carlisle? Be prepared to discuss what you found.

Please spend some time as well with the ArcGIS project from the University of Windsor looking at Canadian Residential Schools and this nine-minute report by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!

12 April           Mascots and Other Forms of Appropriation

Reading: Materials on the Andrea Smith case; Russell Cobb, “Why Do So Many People Pretend to be Native American,” This Land Press, (August 2014), available here; Audra Simpson, “Indigenous Identity Theft Must Stop,” Boston Globe, November 17, 2022.

17 April           Economic Development and Poverty in Indian Country

 Reading: California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians (1987); National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC) website.

                        Journal 6 Due

19 April           The Land and its Loss: The Consequences of Dispossession and Environmental Degradation

Reading: City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation (2005); Stephanie H. Barclay and Michalyn Steele, “Rethinking Protections for Indigenous Sacred Sites,” Harvard Law Review, (forthcoming, on Brightspace).

24 April           Resistance: IDLA to Red Lives Matter, Idle No More

Reading: Watch Film: “You Are On Indian Land;” Cobb, Nations, 203-250;

Lakota Law Project, Native Lives Matter; Jonah Raskin, “Red Lives Matter,” Tablet Magazine, October 10, 2021. You can also read my report about the death or Reynold High Pine in 1972; Jason Pero in Wisconsin and Colten Boushie in 2018; Please also look at the Idle No More website and read about this Canadian movement.

26 April           GREAT DAY—NO CLASSES: Possible Guest Will Visit our Campus and Our Class.

1 May              Health and Well-Being in Native America

Reading: Indian Health Service, “Disparities,” Updated October 2019; Linda Poon, “How ‘Indian Relocation’ Created a Public Health Crisis,” Citylab, 2 December 2019; Mohan B. Kumar and Michael Tjepkema, “Suicide Among First Nations people, Métis and Inuit, 2011-2016),” Statistics Canada, 28 June 2019; Rural Tribal Health Overview, May 2022; Prabir Mandal and Jarett E. Raade, “Major Health Issues of American Indians,” 28 June 2018

3 May              What Is To Be Done?

Reading: Read the Preface, Introduction, and Calls to Action in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report from Canada, 2015, entitled Honouring the Past, Reconciling for the Future (read only the introduction, and whatever else interests you, in Brightspace) and “Calls to Action and Accountability: A Status Update on Reconciliation” by Eva Jewell and Ian Mosby of the Yellowhead Institute, (2019). 

Final Paper Due

8 May           What is to be Done? (Continued)

 Reading: Harold Napoleon, Yuuyarq: The Way of the Human Being, (Fairbanks: Alaska Native Knowledge Network, 1996).

                      Journal 7 Due

10 May            Final Class Meeting

17 May            Final Exam Period, 8:00-11:20: Individual Discussions to consider your final grade.

New Publications

What You Need To Read, June 2022

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It has been a brutal couple of weeks. The news is all bad. Fires are burning in the west and its still early. But at least our brothers and sisters working in the field of Native American history are remaining productive. This is your latest quarterly bibliography of stuff that I think is worth your attention. Please note, about 2/3 of the way down this list, that the third edition of Native America, co-authored this time with Peter Jakob Olsen-Harbich, will be released this fall.

Barnes, Benjamin J. and Stephen Warren, Replanting Cultures: Community-Engaged Scholarship in Indian Country, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2022).

Bennett, Cheryl Redhorse. Our Fight Has Just Begun: Hate Crimes and Justice in Native America, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2022)

Bentley, Matthew and John Bloom, The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

Berthelette, Scott. “’Les Scioux n’étoient bons qu’a manger’: LaColle and the Anisinaabeg-Dakota War, 1730-1742,” Ethnohistory, 69 (No. 1, 2022), 1-27.

Blansett, Kent and Cathleen D. Cahill, Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022).

Bold, Christine. “Vaudeville Indians” on Global Circuits, 1880s to 1930s, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).

Burge, Daniel J. “Genocidal Jesting: The ‘Comic Indian” in US Popular Culture, 1850-1900,” Pacific Historical Review, 91 (Spring 2022), 163-189.

Chakraborty, Tuhin. “Michigan Indian Education Before and After 1934: From Oppression to Neglect,” Michigan Historical Review, 48 (Spring 2022), 63-80.

Daggar, Lori J. Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).

DeJong, David H. Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786-2021, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

Erlandson, Jon, Robert L. DeLong, and Kelly M. Robertson, “Fin Whale (Balaenoptera physalus) bones from a 5850 Year Old Shell Midden on San Miguel Island, California, USA,” Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, 17 (January-March 2022), 142-151.

Feller, Laura J. Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia: Powhatan People and the Color Line, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022).

Geiger, Andrea. Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867-1945, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022).

Hill, James L. Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763-1818, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

Hodge, Adam. “Tradition, Sovereignty and Conservation: The Controversy Surrounding the Wind River Indian Reservation Game Code,” Western Historical Quarterly, 52 (Winter 2021), 369-391.

Huebner, Karin L. “’Brother, after this conduct, Can You Blame Me?’: The Echo of Native American Memory of the 1782 Massacre at Gnadenhutten,” Journal of the Early Republic, 42 (Spring 2022), 1-30.

Hugill, David. Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021).

Iati, Noelle Marie. “’The Doors of Immorality were Set Wide Open by State Authority’: Violence Against Indigenous Women in the Jacksonian Southeast, 1830-1840,” Essays in History 54 (2022), 1-25.

Jurss, Jacob. “Relations Across the Lands: Ojibwe and Dakota Interactions in the Indigenous Borderlands of the Western Great Lakes,” America Indian Quarterly, 45 (Fall 2021), 307-335.

Kelton, Paul. “Pandemic Injustice: Irish Immigrant, Enslaved African American, and Choctaw Experiences with Cholera in 1832,” Journal of Southern History, 88 (February 2022), 73-110.

Kruer, Matthew. Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021).

Krupat, Arnold. From the Boarding Schools: Apache Indian Students Speak, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

Lambert, Valerie. Native Agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).

McGrath, Ann, Laura Rademaker and Jakelin Troy, eds., Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

Meadows, William C. “Kiowa at the Battle of the Washita, 27 November 1868,” Ethnohistory, 68 (October 2021), 519-545.

Meyer, Sabine N. Native Removal Writing: Narratives of Peoplehood, Politics and Law, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022).

Morrow, Julie. “Adapting Against Assimilation: Recovering Anishinaabe Student Writings in Carlisle Indian School Periodicals, 1904-1918,” Australasian Journal of American Studies, 40 (December 2021), 71-101.

Oberg, Michael Leroy and Peter Jakob Olsen-Harbich, Native America: A History, 3rd ed., (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2022).

Odle, Mairin. Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).

Oskison, John M. Unconquerable: The Story of John Ros, Chief of the Cherokees, 1828-1866, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

Pawlicki, Sarah. “’I hear that God Saith Work’: Wunnampuhtogig and Puritans Laboring for Grace in Massachusetts, 1643-1653,” Early American Studies, 20 (Spring 2022), 189-214.

Pigeon, Emilie and Carolyn Podruchny, “Bannock Diplomacy: How Metis Women Fought Battles and Made Peace in North Dakota, 1850s-1870s,” Ethnohistory 69 (Issue 1, 2022), 29-52.

Radding, Cynthia. Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2022).

Richwine, Lindsay. “Comity at the Crossroads: How Friendships between Moravian and Native Women Sustained the Moravian Mission at Shamokin, 1745-1755,” Pennsylvania History 89 (Winter 2022), 1-29.

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).

Smith, A. Lynn. Memory Wars: Settlers and Natives Remember Washington’s Sullivan Expedition of 1779, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

Smithers, Gregory D. Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal, and Sovereignty in Native America, (Boston: Beacon, 2022).

Snyder, Christina. “Many Removals: Re-evaluating the Arc of Indigenous Dispossession,” Journal of the Early Republic, 41 (Winter 2021), 1-29.

Vaught, Sabina, Bryan McKinley, Jones Brayboy, and Jeremiah Chin. The School Prison Trust, (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).

Weaver, Jace and Laura Adams Weaver, Red Clay, 1835: Cherokee Removal and the Meaning of Sovereignty, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022).

Wright, Miller Shores. “Matrilineal Management: How Creek Women and Matrilineages Shaped Distinct Forms of Racialized Slavery in Creek Country at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Southern History, 88 (February 2022), 39-72.

New Publications

What You Need To Read, December 2021

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This is the final week of classes at Geneseo before finals next week. It has been a trying school year for many of us. Nonetheless I completed a few things. Peter Olsen-Harbich and I completed the third edition of Native America and submitted it to our publisher at Wiley. We expect to see it in print and e-book in time for the fall semester in 2022. That means this is the first bibliography that will be considered for the fourth edition of the book, if and when we get around to doing that work. Before we get to that, a long-awaited sabbatical, during which I hope to make a great deal of progress on my next book, a history of the Onondaga Nation. As always, if you think there is something missing here, please let me know and I will run down the cite. Have a good end of the school year.

Akins, Damon B. and William J. Bauer, Jr., We Are the Land: A History of Native California, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021).

Biolsi, Thomas. “The Treaty Imaginary and Tribal Sovereignty in South Dakota,” American Indian Quarterly 45 (Summer 2021), 209-249.

Clements, Christopher. “’There is no trouble at all if the state would keep out’: Indigenous People and New York’s Carceral State,” Journal of American History, 108 (September 2021) 296-319.

Dyck, Erika and Maureen Lux. “Population Control in the Global North? Canada’s Response to Indigenous Reproductive Rights and Neo-Eugenics,” Canadian Historical Review,102 (August 2021), 876-902.

Fisher, Julie A. “Roger Williams and the Indian Business,” New England Quarterly, 50 (September 2021), 552-571.

Haake, Claudia Bettina. “A Duty to Protect and Respect: Seneca Opposition to Incorporation during the Removal Period,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 44 (2020), 21-40.

Haider, Mellie and Manuel P. Teodoro, “Environmental Federalism in Indian Country: Sovereignty, Primacy, and Environmental Protection,” Policy Studies Journal, 49 (August 2021), 887-908.

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Hoy, Benjamin.  A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border Across Indigenous Lands, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

Hausmann, Stephen R. “Erasing Indian Country: Urban Native Space and the 1972 Rapid City Flood,” Western Historical Quarterly, 52 (Autumn 2021), 305-329.

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Teaching Native American History

Montana Story, Part II: Apply Yourself

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And about that college in Montana. It is not that the people in my department did not care about my research. It’s that they saw any small success that came my way as something to resent. Sometimes I told myself that they saw my work through a lens of insecurity, that my productivity reflected on their own lack of productivity. But I was not all that productive in Montana. Anyways, I know now that this was never the case. They were just mean-spirited bastards, and I let those assholes get under my skin.

I have thought about this a lot in light of the Netflix show “The Chair.” I saw someone on twitter ask about Bob Balaban’s character, the starchy and elitist professor of American literature Elliot Rentz. Pembroke University, the fictional setting for “The Chair,” looks like paradise compared to MSU-Billings, which at the time I taught there was a demoralizing hellscape led by a dunce of a President and a dumbbell Dean.

My department consisted of two Jeopardy Champions. One, who was working on a bibliography of lynching, insisted that the infamous Willy Horton advertisement was perfectly acceptable and had nothing to do with race in America. The other was a Harvard-trained historian of the French Revolution who had been denied tenure at two other institutions before he landed in Billings. He did not drive, and relied on students to drive him around. He liked to hang around the dorms. When I left Billings, he warmly congratulated me, told me how great my new department chair was, and then scurried off to tell him how awful I was. My new chair assured me that this reflected badly on everyone in Montana but not on me.

There was also in the department an Iraqi Seventh-Day Adventist who believed that African Americans were moving to Billings because it was an easy place to commit crimes, and a Missouri-Synod Lutheran pastor who proudly claimed that being a professor “was the best part time job in the world.”

There are all sorts of people in the United States who do not want to hear anything bad about the American past. These people can make our jobs difficult. What I think is often overlooked, however, are the barriers to doing the work we do inside the academic institution: administrators who don’t want to draw the dangerous attention of dingbats in the legislature or on the Board of Trustees by discussing controversial subjects; penny-pinching college leaders unwilling to make the investments, personally and financially, to make the college a welcoming space for Indigenous students; and students, even in areas where Native Americans are the largest minority group of campus, who sometimes care nothing at all and Indigenous peoples and their communities. Racism of these stripes was a genuine repressive force in Billings.

I taught there for four years, in an era when it seemed the internet was still in its infancy, without cell phones, and with no computer provided by the college. And because I was a single parent for three of my four years, I could easily stay out of the loop. I was really busy, and Billings felt far away from everything. The right-wingers like Lynne Cheney and Pat Buchanan who, at that time, denounced “politically correct” history, really did not affect me much at all. Not directly, anyways. What mattered more was teaching a subject that was considered provocative, in a bad way, at an institution presided over by leaders who actively discouraged discussions raising challenging questions about the American past.

I was hired to teach the history of Early America, from the colonial period through the “Age of Jackson.” It just so happened that not only had my predecessor left, but another guy, who taught Native American history was retiring. During my on-campus interview, he drove me forty miles to a bar in Columbus, Montana, where we split a six pack of Budweiser. He was a good guy, I think. He left me a ton of books. He taught the subject as little more than the history of the Plains Wars.

New Atlas Saloon in Columbus, Montana – Legends of America
The New Atlas Bar, Columbus MT.

That wasn’t me. I focused my research on the seventeenth century. I was turning my dissertation into a book. I had a much broader coverage in mind. What do to, then, when the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, in a meeting after my first contract renewal, told me that she wanted to see more “relevant” and “applied” research? No one in Montana cared about the history of the Chesapeake or New England, she seemed to suggest.

Eastern Montana State Normal School, Billings, Montana

Contract renewals were tough. Each year my contract came up for renewal. Each year, the two Jeopardy champions voted to fire me. Each year, the Pastor and the Seventh-Day Adventist voted to keep me around. One student member of the committee, God bless them, voted each year to save my job. It was tense, and I needed every ally I could get.

So I tried to play ball. I started speaking with some of my students who drove to Billings from the Crow Reservation. I learned a lot, things I had read in no scholarly monograph. What came from these conversations was the racism these students faced–in high school in Hardin, Montana, in the city of Billings, and in classrooms at my college. Perhaps there was a story to tell here.

I cannot remember the details. There had been some event at Hardin High. The non-Indigenous students stayed home from some sort of cultural awareness day, their truancy excused by their parents. The Crow kids, as kids will do, made some noise about racism. The next day, distributed throughout Hardin, were copies of some white nationalist text like The White Man’s Bible. I went down to Hardin. I tried to learn more. I tried to blend in and listen. I talked to a few people about racism in Hardin. I had gathered some great insights about racism in a reservation border town. This struck me as immediately significant and relevant to life in Montana and in a host of western states. In the end, it was too difficult to do the research. I would have had to spend a lot of time in Hardin, an hour’s drive from where I lived, and my family life would not permit that. But the bigger barrier was the Dean, who somehow had become the Provost, or something like that. I ran into her, somewhere on campus, whcih almost never happened, and told her about the project. I could see clearly from her reaction that this was not what she had in mind at all.

I left Billings in 1998. At Geneseo, where I have taught pretty much ever since, I have been able to do what I wanted to do. We do not have a lot of money, but in every other way my research has been supported.

And that’s the key point. To do research requires a network of support. It is easier for us to do our work when we have interested colleagues who encourage us and provide pointed criticism, administrators who recognize the value of what we do. With that assistance, we can stand up to the racists, the haters, the bigots and trolls. That part of the job becomes easy. It’s when these things are missing that our academic lives can be miserable.

History and Historians

What Makes You Ask “Why?”

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There is a tweet by Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution that has raised the ire of more than a few historians.

I will admit that I do not follow Hamid’s work. I have read a piece he wrote for The Atlantic, but I have not read his books. Tweets are a poor way to communicate a complex argument, so I want to be charitable. A large number of critics responded to Hamid’s tweet by pointing out that historians have written important and illuminating books about Hitler and the Nazis, and about Stalin and Stalinism. They wrote about people and groups who they found utterly despicable.

Hamid’s argument, as he stated it on Twitter, is simplistic and short-sighted. But it is not entirely without merit. In another tweet in the thread, Hamid seemed to call upon scholars to honor what the historian Peter Novick long ago called “That Noble Dream,” the ideal of objectivity, in their scholarly work.

This echoes the basic advice many aspiring historians learn early in their schooling. Be aware of your biases, and try to shed them when you enter the library, archives, or study hall. You need to keep your eyes, your ears, and your heart open when you frame the questions that guide your research. Historians agree with Hamid that we all must be fair when we assess the evidence we uncover. But I still see this entire argument as problematic. It is precisely not the advice we should give to aspiring historians. Objectivity and neutrality are not he same thing.

What is it that causes you to ask “Why?” History is not a science, but it is a discipline. It is the study of continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions, and cultures. Historians ask questions about continuity and change, and they answer them in a thorough and disciplined manner. History is, for many of us, a subject we came to out of a sense that something is wrong, that there were better alternatives to our current reality that never were explored. Why? As the historian Tom Crick explained in Graeme Swift’s novel Waterland, the practice of asking “Why?” is fundamental to the human condition, and it emerges from a sense that not all is as it should be. Why did this happen? And why the conditions that led to that? And so on and so on and so on.

In Native American History I think this is especially the case. A student reads about an incident, an episode, or a historical process and is staggered by what she reads. She has to understand why this happened. She despises the people she studies, whether it is the Paxton Boys, the murderous militiamen at Gnaddenhutten, Chivington of Sand Creek, or the founders of the Indian boarding schools. If she works in a disciplined manner, her strong feelings will not stand in the way of sound academic work. Her passions and her interests brought her to the very questions she asks. Students always should write about those subjects that matter to them, those subjects that get under their skin. It is the questions that keep you up at night that lead to good historical work.

There is so much suffering in the past. If we are to pretend that the study of history will make things better, how can we not choose sides? History has been in the news so much during what I hope are the final weeks of the Trump administration. The President has called for a patriotic history that will teach children to love their country. In the same breath he denounces “socialist” educators who “hate America.” In a sense, Trump and Hamid share a belief that the strong feelings of a scholar will lead them to produce biased, partisan, and tendentious work.

But that is not how it works. There is dreadful and pointless history written by scholars who cling to the mantle of objectivity, and fantastic work written by activist historians. There is no necessary division between scholarship and activism when both are done honestly and in a disciplined manner.

History enters into everything. For every student who has looked at the world and thought, “this is not right,” and wondered how or why things have changed or failed to change, there is a historical answer. The young person, marching with a BLM banner may be driven to study the continued violence of law enforcement against peoples of color and conclude that systemic racism is a reality in American life. Her very existence, her understanding of the harsh realities of racism, led her to her academic work. Long ago, my own disgust about “Indian Removal,” a subject about which I knew little and responded to more on the level of emotion and sentiment rather than knowledge, launched me into a career in history.

Many of those who do not like what we say about the past will question our motives. They will assume that we are dragging up negative and hateful stories about the past because we hate the people or the places we study, and that we want or need our readers and students to hate those things as much as us. But that is not it at all. It is our sense that all is not well that leads us to ask questions about the past. We work because we are so aware of the enormous, yawning gap between the way things are and the way things ought to be, and we know that we will never bridge it without understanding how that chasm formed in the first place, and those who benefit from its continued existence.