Blood Will TellThe history of blood quantum as a policy reveals assimilation's implications and legacy. The role of blood quantum is integral to understanding how Native Americans came to be one of the most disadvantaged groups in the United States, and it remains a significant part of present-day debates about Indian identity and tribal membership.
Native AmericansWhat does it mean to be a Native American? Perhaps Native American model Stormy Hollingsworth (Ute) says it best, "to be proud, to know that our past and our whole history is a circle of life." This program introduces us to members of the Ute, Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Omaha nations, who reveal that Indians' lives are based on a circle which incorporates their beliefs in respecting their heritage, preserving their traditions and educating their young.
Blood Will TellKatherine Ellinghaus traces the idea of blood quantum and how the concept came to dominate Native identity and national status between 1887 and 1934 and how related exclusionary policies functioned to dispossess Native people of their land. The U.S. government's unspoken assumption at the time was that Natives of mixed descent were undeserving of tribal status and benefits, notwithstanding that Native Americans of mixed descent played crucial roles in the national implementation of allotment policy.
Native Americans of New EnglandNative Americans of New England takes view of the history of indigenous peoples of the region, reconstructing this past from the earliest available archeological evidence to the present. It examines how historic processes shaped and reshaped the lives of Native peoples, and uses case studies, historic sketches, and biographies to tell these stories.
How to trace your Native American heritage."How to trace your Native American heritage" teaches how to search out your Native American ancestors, obtain tribal citizenship, how to research the Dawes Rolls and discover your heritage.
I am where I come from : native American college students and graduates tell their life storiesThe organizing principle for this anthology is the common Native American heritage of its authors; and yet that thread proves to be the most tenuous of all, as the experience of indigeneity differs radically for each of them. While many experience a centripetal pull toward a cohesive Indian experience, the indications throughout these essays lean toward a richer, more illustrative panorama of difference. What tends to bind them together are not cultural practices or spiritual attitudes per se, but rather circumstances that have no exclusive province in Indian country.
Red Matters : Native American StudiesArnold Krupat, one of the most original and respected critics working in Native American studies today, offers a clear and compelling set of reasons why red-Native American culture, history, and literature-should matter to Americans more than it has to date.
Additional Resources
Native American Heritage MonthThis Web portal is a collaborative project of the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
Let's Celebrate
On the Shelf
Living Nations, Living Words by Joy Harjo (Ed.); Carla D. Hayden (Foreword by);Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project?including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others?to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem?showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, ?that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship.? In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations.?Living Nations, Living Words?is a representative offering.
Call Number: PS591.I55 L56 2021
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-OrtizToday 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.
Call Number: E76.8 .D86 2014
As Long As Grass Grows by Dina Gilio-WhitakerThe story of Native peoples' resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community's rich history of activism. The story of Native peoples' resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community's rich history of activism Through the unique lens of "Indigenized environmental justice," Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle. As Long As Grass Grows gives readers an accessible history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy. Throughout 2016, the Standing Rock protest put a national spotlight on Indigenous activists, but it also underscored how little Americans know about the longtime historical tensions between Native peoples and the mainstream environmental movement. Ultimately, she argues, modern environmentalists must look to the history of Indigenous resistance for wisdom and inspiration in our common fight for a just and sustainable future.
Call Number: E98.S67 G55 2019
1491 by Charles C. MannThe author 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.
Call Number: E61 .M266 2011
Intimate Frontiers by Albert L. HurtadoThis book reveals how powerful undercurrents of sex, gender, and culture helped shape the history of the American frontier from the 1760s to the 1850s. Looking at California under three flags -- those of Spain, Mexico, and the United States -- Hurtado resurrects daily life in the missions, at mining camps, on overland trails and sea journeys, and in San Francisco.
Call Number: F864 .H897 1999
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon SilkoTayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He is deeply scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese and further wounded by the rejection he encounters from his people. Only by immersing himself in the Indian past can he begin to regain the peace that was taken from him.
Call Number: PS3569.I44 C4 2006
Killers of the Flower Moon by David GrannIn the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case.
Call Number: E99.O8 G675 2018
There There by Tommy OrangeThe novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.
Call Number: PS3615.R32 T48 2019b
Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma by Camilla TownsendCamilla Townsend's stunning new book differs from all previous biographies of Pocahontas in capturing how similar seventeenth century Native Americans were - in the way they saw, understood, and struggled to control their world - not only to the invading British but to ourselves.
Call Number: E99.P85 P5797 2004
Colonize This! by Daisy Hernández; Bushra Rehman (Eds)This anthology offers gripping portraits of American life as seen through the eyes of young women of color. Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman have collected a diverse, lively group of emerging writers who speak to the strength of community and the influence of color.
Call Number: HQ1161 .C65 2019
Racialized Media by Matthew W. Hughey; Emma González-Lesser (Eds)From Black Panther to #OscarsSoWhite, the concept of "race," and how it is represented in media, has continued to attract attention in the public eye. This new collection of original essays examines a number of different mediums, including film, television, books, newspapers, social media, video games, and comics. Each chapter explores the impact of contemporary media on racial politics, culture, and meaning in society.