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1491 : new revelations of the Americas before Columbus
Mann, Charles C.
Mann shows how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques have come to previously unheard-of conclusions about the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans: In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe. Certain cities–such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital–were greater in population than any European city. Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets. The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids. Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively “landscaped” by human beings. Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process that the journal Science recently described as “man’s first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering.
Our way–a parallel history : an anthology of native history, reflection, and story
Cajune, Julie, editor.
“In this sweeping exploration of Indigenous culture, Our Way-A Parallel History brings together Native scholars and leaders to examine the incredible diversity of Native cultures in the US. Representing more than ten Indigenous nations, the contributors seek to dispel the myth, stereotype, and absence of information about American Indian, Native Alaskan, and Native Hawaiian people in the master narrative of US history and how we understand our country today. Covering topics such as Native stories and language, Native education, the origins of democracy, the legacy of colonialism, and the indefatigable strength of Indigenous cultures to survive and thrive in the face of almost insurmountable odds, Our Way explores the ways in which Indigenous cultures from every corner of the nation have influenced American society, through the past and into the present day.
The rediscovery of America: native peoples and the unmaking of U. S. history
Blackhawk, Ned
The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non-Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that: European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success; Native nations helped shape England’s crisis of empire; the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior; California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War; the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West; twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy. Blackhawk’s retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.
The heartbeat of Wounded Knee: native America from 1890 to the present
Treuer, David
The received idea of Native American history–as promulgated by books like Dee Brown’s mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee–has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and novels, David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative. Because they did not disappear–and not despite but rather because of their intense struggles to preserve their language, their traditions, their families, and their very existence–the story of American Indians since the end of the nineteenth century to the present is one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention. In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes’ distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don’t know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is the essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.
“All the real Indians died off”: and 20 other myths about Native Americans
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, 1938-
Dunbar-Ortiz deftly shows how myths about Native Americans are rooted in the fears and prejudice of European settlers and in the larger political agendas of a settler state aimed at acquiring Indigenous land and are tied to narratives of erasure and disappearance. Accessibly written and revelatory, All the Real Indians Died Off challenges readers to rethink what they have been taught about Native Americans and history.
The Indian world of George Washington : the first President, the first Americans, and the birth of the nation
Calloway, Colin G. 1953-
A biography of America’s founding father and those on whose land he based the nation’s future George Washington dominates the narrative of the nation’s birth, yet American history has largely forgotten what he knew: that the country’s fate depended less on grand rhetorical statements of independence and self-governance than on land – Indian land. While other histories have overlooked the central importance of Indian power during the country’s formative years, Colin G. Calloway here gives Native American leaders their due, revealing the relationship between the man who rose to become the most powerful figure in his country and the Native tribes whose dominion he usurped.In this sweeping new biography, Calloway uses the prism of Washington’s life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time – Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Red Jacket, Little Turtle – and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America’s founding. The Indian World of George Washington spans decades of Native American leaders’ interaction with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands, to his military career against both the French and the British, to his presidency, when he dealt with Native Americans as a head of state would with a foreign power, using every means of diplomacy and persuasion to fulfill the new republic’s destiny by appropriating their land. By the end of his life, Washington knew more than anyone else in America about the frontier and its significance to the future of his country.The Indian World of George Washington offers a fresh portrait of the most revered American and the Native Americans whose story has been only partially told. Calloway’s biography invites us to look again at the story of America’s beginnings and see the country in a whole new light.
Everything you wanted to know about Indians but were afraid to ask
Treuer, Anton
From the acclaimed Ojibwe author and professor Anton Treuer comes an essential book of questions and answers for Native and non-Native young readers alike. Ranging from “Why is there such a fuss about nonnative people wearing Indian costumes for Halloween?” to “Why is it called a ‘traditional Indian fry bread taco’?” to “What’s it like for natives who don’t look native?” to “Why are Indians so often imagined rather than understood?”, and beyond, Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask (Young Readers Edition) does exactly what its title says for young readers, in a style consistently thoughtful, personal, and engaging. Updated and expanded to include: * Dozens of New Questions and New Sections–including a social activism section that explores the Dakota Access Pipeline, racism, identity, politics, and more!
This land is their land : the Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the troubled history of Thanksgiving
Silverman, David J., 1971-
Ahead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, a new look at the Plymouth colony’s founding events, told for the first time with Wampanoag people at the heart of the story. In March 1621, when Plymouth’s survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth’s governor, John Carver, declared their people’s friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousmaequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the “First Thanksgiving.” The treaty remained operative until King Philip’s War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end. 400 years after that famous meal, historian David J. Silverman sheds profound new light on the events that led to the creation, and bloody dissolution, of this alliance. Focusing on the Wampanoag Indians, Silverman deepens the narrative to consider tensions that developed well before 1620 and lasted long after the devastating war-tracing the Wampanoags’ ongoing struggle for self-determination up to this very day. This unsettling history reveals why some modern Native people hold a Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, a holiday which celebrates a myth of colonialism and white proprietorship of the United States. This Land is Their Land shows that it is time to rethink how we, as a pluralistic nation, tell the history of Thanksgiving.
The name of war : King Philip’s War and the origins of American identity
Lepore, Jill, 1966-
Examines how the American colonists interpreted the brutal war that erupted between them and Native Americans in New England in 1675, showing how they looked to it during the Revolution and used it to justify nineteenth-century Indian removals. 10,000 first printing.
Brethren by nature : New England Indians, colonists, and the origins of American slavery
Newell, Margaret Ellen, 1962-
In Brethren by Nature , Margaret Ellen Newell reveals a little-known aspect of American history: English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of Indians. Massachusetts became the first English colony to legalize slavery in 1641, and the colonists? desire for slaves shaped the major New England Indian wars, including the Pequot War of 1637, King Philip?s War of 1675?76, and the northeastern Wabanaki conflicts of 1676?1749. When the wartime conquest of Indians ceased, New Englanders turned to the courts to get control of their labor, or imported Indians from Florida and the Carolinas, or simply claimed free Indians as slaves.
Drawing on letters, diaries, newspapers, and court records, Newell recovers the slaves? own stories and shows how they influenced New England society in crucial ways. Indians lived in English homes, raised English children, and manned colonial armies, farms, and fleets, exposing their captors to Native religion, foods, and technology. Some achieved freedom and power in this new colonial culture, but others experienced violence, surveillance, and family separations.
Newell also explains how slavery linked the fate of Africans and Indians. The trade in Indian captives connected New England to Caribbean and Atlantic slave economies. Indians labored on sugar plantations in Jamaica, tended fields in the Azores, and rowed English naval galleys in Tangier. Indian slaves outnumbered Africans within New England before 1700, but the balance soon shifted. Fearful of the growing African population, local governments stripped Indian and African servants and slaves of legal rights and personal freedoms. Nevertheless, because Indians remained a significant part of the slave population, the New England colonies did not adopt all of the rigid racial laws typical of slave societies in Virginia and Barbados. Newell finds that second- and third-generation Indian slaves fought their enslavement and claimed citizenship in cases that had implications for all enslaved peoples in eighteenth-century America.
Our beloved kin : a new history of King Philip’s War
Brooks, Lisa Tanya
First Indian War” (later named King Philip’s War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. In reading seventeenth-century sources alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history, Brooks’s pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England.
Mayflower : a story of courage, community, and war
Philbrick, Nathaniel
From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as author Philbrick reveals, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a 55-year epic. The Mayflower’s religious refugees arrived in Plymouth Harbor during a period of crisis for Native Americans, as disease spread by European fishermen devastated their populations. Initially the two groups maintained a fragile working relationship. But within decades, New England erupted into King Philip’s War, a savage conflict that nearly wiped out colonists and natives alike, and forever altered the face of the fledgling colonies and the country that would grow from them. Philbrick has fashioned a fresh portrait of the dawn of American history–dominated right from the start by issues of race, violence, and religion.
Terror to the wicked : America’s first murder trial by jury, that ended a war and helped to form a nation
Pearl, Tobey
A brutal killing, an all-out manhunt, and a riveting account of the first murder trial in U.S. history–set in the 1600s in colonial New England against the backdrop of the Pequot War (between the Pequot tribe and the colonists of Massachusetts Bay), an explosive trial whose outcome changed the course of history, ended a two-year war, and brought about a peace that allowed the colonies to become a full-blown nation. The year: 1638. The setting: Providence, Plymouth Colony. A young Nipmuc tribesman, returning home from trading beaver pelts, is fatally stabbed in a robbery in the woods near Plymouth Colony, by a white runaway servant and fellow rogues. The young tribesman, fighting for his life, is able, with his final breaths, to reveal the details of the attack to Providence’s governor, Roger Williams. A frantic manhunt by the fledgling government of Plymouth ensues, followed by the convening of the first trial, with Plymouth’s governor Thomas Prence presiding as judge. The jury: local settlers (white) whose allegiance seems more likely to be with the accused than with the murdered (a native) . . . Tobey Pearl, piecing together a fascinating narrative through original research and first-rate detective work, re-creates in detail the full and startling, pivotal moment in pre-revolutionary America, as she examines the evolution of our nascent civil liberties and the role of the jury as a safeguard against injustice.
God, War, and Providence: The Epic Struggle of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians against the Puritans of New England
Warren, James A.
God, War, and Providence tells the epic story of resistance to Puritan domination in Rhode Island, the heretic colony that was home to the Narragansetts, seventeenth-century New England’s most powerful Indian tribe, and to Roger Williams, America’s leading advocate of religious freedom. Dramatically banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, Williams purchased land from the Narragansetts and founded the town of Providence, Rhode Island, as a place where Indian and English cultures could flourish side by side, in peace. The Puritans, however, wanted to control Providence and achieve mastery over the Narragansetts. Williams and the Narragansetts waged a grueling forty-year resistance campaign against Puritan subjugation. Despite constant harassment, the tribe steadfastly refused to buckle under to the authority of the Puritan political confederation. After two military operations against the tribe sputtered into failure, an army of a thousand Puritan soldiers launched a ferocious attack on the tribe’s remote fort in December 1675. The Great Swamp Fight drew the Narragansetts into the tragic and immensely destructive conflict known as King Philip’s War, the event that historian Jill Lepore describes as the ‘defining moment, when any lingering, though slight, possibility for [Indian] political and cultural autonomy was lost.’ In God, War, and Providence, James A. Warren explores in detail the remarkable alliance between Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians, explaining how they joined forces to defend their autonomy and their distinctive ways of life against Puritan encroachment. Deeply researched and vividly written, this spellbinding account of the Narragansetts’ courageous resistance campaign serves as a telling precedent for white-Native American encounters along the North American frontier for the next 250 years.
An indigenous peoples’ history of the United States
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, 1938-
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.” Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
Reséndez, Andrés
A landmark history — the sweeping story of the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians across America, from the time of the conquistadors up to the early 20th century Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery , it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors, then forced to descend into the “mouth of hell” of eighteenth-century silver mines or, later, made to serve as domestics for Mormon settlers and rich Anglos. Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery, more than epidemics, that decimated Indian populations across North America. New evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, Indian captives, and Anglo colonists, sheds light too on Indian enslavement of other Indians — as what started as a European business passed into the hands of indigenous operators and spread like wildfire across vast tracts of the American Southwest. The Other Slavery reveals nothing less than a key missing piece of American history. For over two centuries we have fought over, abolished, and tried to come to grips with African-American slavery. It is time for the West to confront an entirely separate, equally devastating enslavement we have long failed truly to see.
Indigenous continent: the epic contest for North America
Hämäläinen, Pekka, 1967-
This nation’s history and self-understanding have long depended on the notion of a “colonial America,” an epoch that supposedly laid the foundation for the modern United States. In Indigenous Continent, Pekka Hämäläinen overturns the traditional, Eurocentric narrative, demonstrating that, far from being weak and helpless “victims” of European colonialism, Indigenous peoples controlled North America well into the 19th century. From the Iroquois and Pueblos to the Lakotas and Comanches, Native empires frequently decimated white newcomers in battle, forcing them to accept and even adopt Native ways. Even as the white population skyrocketed and colonists’ land greed become ever more extravagant, Indigenous peoples flourished due to sophisticated diplomacy and flexible leadership structures. As Hämäläinen ultimately contends, instead of “colonial America” we should speak of an “Indigenous America” that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial. In our myth-busting era, this restoration of Native Americans to their rightful place at the very center of American history will be seen as one of the most important correctives yet.
Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a great American land grab
Inskeep, Steve
Five decades after the Revolutionary War, the United States approached a constitutional crisis. At its center stood two former military comrades locked in a struggle that tested the boundaries of our fledgling democracy. One man we recognize: Andrew Jackson–war hero, populist, and exemplar of the expanding South–whose first major initiative as President instigated the massive expulsion of Native Americans known as the Trail of Tears. The other is a half-forgotten figure: John Ross–a mixed-race Cherokee politician and diplomat–who used the United States’ own legal system and democratic ideals to oppose Jackson. Representing one of the Five Civilized Tribes who had adopted the ways of white settlers–cultivating farms, publishing a newspaper in their own language, and sending children to school–Ross championed the tribes’ cause all the way to the Supreme Court. He gained allies like Senator Henry Clay, Chief Justice John Marshall, and even Davy Crockett. In a fight that seems at once distant and familiar, Ross and his allies made their case in the media, committed civil disobedience, and benefited from the first mass political action by American women. At stake in this struggle was the land of the Five Civilized Tribes. In shocking detail, Jacksonland reveals how Jackson, as a general, extracted immense wealth from his own armies’ conquest of native lands. Later, as president, Jackson set in motion the seizure of tens of millions of acres in today’s Deep South. This is the story of America at a moment of transition, when the fate of states and nations was decided by the actions of two heroic yet tragically opposed men.
The longest trail: writings on American Indian history, culture, and politics
Josephy, Alvin M., 1915-2005
Alvin Josephy Jr.’s groundbreaking, popular books and essays advocated for a fair and true historical assessment of Native Americans, and set the course for modern Native American studies. This collection, which includes magazine articles, speeches, a white paper, and introductions and chapters of books, gives a generous and reasoned view of five hundred years of Indian history in North America from first settlements in the East to the long trek of the Nez Perce Indians in the Northwest. The essays deal with the origins of still unresolved troubles with treaties and territories to fishing and land rights, and who should own archeological finds, as well as the ideologies that underpin our Indian policy. Taken together the pieces give a revelatory introduction to American Indian history, a history that continues both to fascinate and inform.
The Earth is weeping: the epic story of the Indian wars for the American West
Cozzens, Peter, 1957-
With the end of the Civil War, the nation recommenced its expansion onto traditional Indian tribal lands, setting off a wide-ranging conflict that would last more than three decades. In an exploration of the wars and negotiations that destroyed tribal ways of life even as they made possible the emergence of the modern United States, Peter Cozzens gives us both sides in comprehensive and singularly intimate detail. He illuminates the encroachment experienced by the tribes and the tribal conflicts over whether to fight or make peace, and explores the squalid lives of soldiers posted to the frontier and the ethical quandaries faced by generals who often sympathized with their native enemies.
Toward the setting sun: John Ross, the Cherokees, and the Trail of Tears
Hicks, Brian, 1966-
Toward the Setting Sun chronicles one of the most significant but least explored periods in American history, recounting the little known story of the first white man to champion the voiceless Native American cause. Son of a Scottish trader and a quarter-Cherokee woman, Ross was educated in white schools and was only one-eighth Indian by blood. But as Cherokee chief in the mid-nineteenth century, he would guide the tribe through its most turbulent period. The Cherokees’ plight lay at the epicenter of nearly all the key issues facing a young America: western expansion, states’ rights, judicial power, and racial discrimination. Clashes between Ross and President Andrew Jackson raged from battlefields to the White House and Supreme Court. As whites settled illegally on the Nation’s land, the chief steadfastly refused to sign a removal treaty. Only when a group of renegade Cherokees betrayed their chief and negotiated an agreement with Jackson’s men was he forced to begin his journey west. In one of America’s great tragedies, thousands died during the Cherokees’ migration on the Trail of Tears. Toward the Setting Sun retells the story of expansionism from the native perspective, and takes a critical look at the well-rehearsed story of American progress.
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