A Best Book of 2021 by NPR and Esquire From Kliph Nesteroff, "the human encyclopedia of comedy" (VICE), comes the important and underappreciated story of Native Americans and comedy.It was one of the most reliable jokes in Charlie Hill's stand-up routine: "My people are from Wisconsin. We used to be from New York. We had a little real estate problem." In We Had a Little Real Estate Problem, acclaimed comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff focuses on one of comedy's most significant and little-known stories: how, despite having been denied representation in the entertainment industry, Native Americans have influenced and advanced the art form. The account begins in the late 1880s, when Native Americans were forced to tour in wild west shows as an alternative to prison. (One modern comedian said it was as "if a Guantanamo detainee suddenly had to appear on X-Factor.") This is followed by a detailed look at the life and work of seminal figures such as Cherokee humorist Will Rogers and Hill, who in the 1970s was the first Native American comedian to appear The Tonight Show. Also profiled are several contemporary comedians, including Jonny Roberts, a social worker from the Red Lake Nation who drives five hours to the closest comedy club to pursue his stand-up dreams; Kiowa-Apache comic Adrianne Chalepah, who formed the touring group the Native Ladies of Comedy; and the 1491s, a sketch troupe whose satire is smashing stereotypes to critical acclaim. As Ryan Red Corn, the Osage member of the 1491s, says: "The American narrative dictates that Indians are supposed to be sad. It's not really true and it's not indicative of the community experience itself...Laughter and joy is very much a part of Native culture." Featuring dozens of original interviews and the exhaustive research that is Nesteroff's trademark, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem is a powerful tribute to a neglected legacy.

Herder Warfare in East Africa presents a regional analysis of the spatial and social history of warfare among the nomadic peoples of East Africa, covering a period of 600 years. The long duree facilitates understanding of how warfare among pastoralist communities in earlier centuries contributed to political, economic and ethnic shifts across the grazing lands in East Africa. The book discusses herder warfare from the perspective of warfare ecology, highlighting the interrelations between environmental and cultural causalities - including droughts, famine, floods, ritual wars, religious wars and migrations - and the processes and consequences of war. Regional synthesis concentrates on frontiers of conflicts extending from the White Nile Basin in south Sudan - into the southern savannas of East Africa, the Great East African Rift Valley, and the northern and southern Horn of Africa - examining historical military power shifts between diverse pastoralist cultures. Case studies are set in the coastal hinterland of East Africa and the Jubaland-Wajir frontiers. Warfare combined with environmental disasters caused social-economic breakdowns and the enslavement of defeated groups. The dynamics of herder warfare changed after colonial entry, response to pastoralist resistance and slave emancipation. The book is of interest to specialist and non-specialist readers exploring pastoralism, social anthropology and warfare and conflict studies; and is suitable for introductory graduate courses in environmental and social history of warfare .

The stories of the Cherokee people presented here capture in written form tales of history, myth, and legend for readers, speakers, and scholars of the Cherokee language. Assembled by noted authorities on Cherokee, this volume marks an unparalleled contribution to the linguistic analysis, understanding, and preservation of Cherokee language and culture. Cherokee Narratives spans the spectrum of genres, including humor, religion, origin myths, trickster tales, historical accounts, and stories about the Eastern Cherokee language. These stories capture the voices of tribal elders and form a living record of the Cherokee Nation and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians' oral tradition. Each narrative appears in four different formats: the first is interlinear, with each line shown in the Cherokee syllabary, a corresponding roman orthography, and a free English translation; the second format consists of a morpheme-by-morpheme analysis of each word; and the third and fourth formats present the entire narrative in the Cherokee syllabary and in a free English translation. The narratives and their linguistic analysis are a rich source of information for those who wish to deepen their knowledge of the Cherokee syllabary, as well as for students of Cherokee history and culture. By enabling readers at all skill levels to use and reconstruct the Cherokee language, this collection of tales will sustain the life and promote the survival of Cherokee for generations to come.

In May 1776 more than two hundred Indian warriors descended the St. Lawrence River to attack Continental forces at the Cedars, west of Montreal. In just three days' fighting, the Native Americans and their British and Canadian allies forced the American fort to surrender and ambushed a fatally delayed relief column. In Down the Warpath to the Cedars, author Mark R. Anderson flips the usual perspective on this early engagement and focuses on its Native participants - their motivations, battlefield conduct, and the event's impact in their world. In this way, Anderson's work establishes and explains Native Americans' centrality in the Revolutionary War's northern theater. Anderson's dramatic, deftly written narrative encompasses decisive diplomatic encounters, political intrigue, and scenes of brutal violence but is rooted in deep archival research and ethnohistorical scholarship. It sheds new light on the alleged massacre and atrocities that other accounts typically focus on. At the same time, Anderson traces the aftermath for Indian captives and military hostages, as well as the political impact of the Cedars reaching all the way to the Declaration of Independence. The action at the Cedars emerges here as a watershed moment, when Indian neutrality frayed to the point that hundreds of northern warriors entered the fight between crown and colonies. Adroitly interweaving the stories of diverse characters - chiefs, officials, agents, soldiers, and warriors - Down the Warpath to the Cedars produces a complex picture, and a definitive account, of the Revolutionary War's first Indian battles, an account that significantly expands our historical understanding of the northern theater of the American Revolution.

This book challenges long-accepted historical orthodoxy about relations between the Spanish and the Indians in the borderlands separating what are now Mexico and the United States. While most scholars describe the decades after 1790 as a period of relative peace between the occupying Spaniards and the Apaches, Mark Santiago sees in the Mescalero Apache attacks on the Spanish beginning in 1795 a sustained, widespread, and bloody conflict. He argues that Commandant General Pedro de Nava's coordinated campaigns against the Mescaleros were the culmination of the Spanish military's efforts to contain Apache aggression, constituting one of its largest and most sustained operations in northern New Spain. A Bad Peace and a Good War examines the antecedents, tactics, and consequences of the fighting. This conflict occurred immediately after the Spanish military had succeeded in making an uneasy peace with portions of all Apache groups. The Mescaleros were the first to break the peace, annihilating two Spanish patrols in August 1795. Galvanized by the loss, Commandant General Nava struggled to determine the extent to which Mescaleros residing in ""peace establishments"" outside Spanish settlements near El Paso, San Elizario, and Presidio del Norte were involved. Santiago looks at the impact of conflicting Spanish military strategies and increasing demands for fiscal efficiency as a result of Spain's imperial entanglements. He examines Nava's yearly invasions of Mescalero territory, his divide-and-rule policy using other Apaches to attack the Mescaleros, and his deportation of prisoners from the frontier, preventing the Mescaleros from redeeming their kin. Santiago concludes that the consequences of this war were overwhelmingly negative for Mescaleros and ambiguous for Spaniards. The war's legacy of bitterness lasted far beyond the end of Spanish rule, and the continued independence of so many Mescaleros and other Apaches in their homeland proved the limits of Spanish military authority. In the words of Viceroy Bernardo de Galvez, the Spaniards had technically won a ""good war"" against the Mescaleros and went on to manage a ""bad peace.

Carlos Castaneda takes the reader into the very heart of sorcery, challenging both imagination and reason, shaking the very foundations of our belief in what is "natural" and "logical." His landscape is full of terrors and mysterious forces, as sharply etched as a flash of lightning on the deserts and mountains where don Juan takes him to pursue the sorcerer's knowledge--the knowledge that it is the Eagle that gives us, at our births, a spark of awareness, that it expects to reclaim at the end of our lives and which the sorcerer, through his discipline, fights to retain. Castaneda describes how don Juan and his party, left thisworld--"the warriors of don Juan's party had caught me for an eternal instant, before they vanished into the total light, before the Eagle let them go through"--and how he, himself, upon witnessing such a sight, jumped into the abyss.

For American Indians, tribal politics are paramount. They determine the standards for tribal enrollment, guide negotiations with outside governments, and help set collective economic and cultural goals. But how, asks Raymond I. Orr, has history shaped the American Indian political experience? By exploring how different tribes' politics and internal conflicts have evolved over time, Reservation Politics offers rare insight into the role of historical experience in the political lives of American Indians. To trace variations in political conflict within tribes today to their different historical experiences, Orr conducted an ethnographic analysis of three federally recognized tribes: the Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico, the Citizen Potawatomi in Oklahoma, and the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota. His extensive interviews and research reveal that at the center of tribal politics are intratribal factions with widely different worldviews. These factions make conflicting claims about the purpose, experience, and identity of their tribe. Reservation Politics points to two types of historical experience relevant to the construction of tribes' political and economic worldviews: historical trauma, such as ethnic cleansing or geographic removal, and the incorporation of Indian communities into the market economy. In Orr's case studies, differences in experience and interpretation gave rise to complex worldviews that in turn have shaped the beliefs and behavior at play in Indian politics. By engaging a topic often avoided in political science and American Indian studies, Reservation Politics allows us to see complex historical processes at work in contemporary American Indian life. Orr's findings are essential to understanding why tribal governments make the choices they do.

"The first biography of this important American Indian artist"

Artist, teacher, and Red Progressive, Angel De Cora (1869-1919) painted "Fire Light" to capture warm memories of her Nebraska Winnebago childhood. In this biography, Linda M. Waggoner draws on that glowing image to illuminate De Cora's life and artistry, which until now have been largely overlooked by scholars.

One of the first American Indian artists to be accepted within the mainstream art world, De Cora left her childhood home on the Winnebago reservation to find success in the urban Northeast at the turn of the twentieth century. Despite scant documentary sources that elucidate De Cora's private life, Waggoner has rendered a complete picture of the woman known in her time as the first "real Indian artist." She depicts De Cora as a multifaceted individual who as a young girl took pride in her traditions, forged a bond with the land that would sustain her over great distances, and learned the role of cultural broker from her mother's Metis family.

After studying with famed illustrator Howard Pyle at his first Brandywine summer school, De Cora eventually succeeded in establishing the first "Native Indian" art department at Carlisle Indian School. A founding member of the Society of American Indians, she made a significant impact on the American Arts and Crafts movement by promoting indigenous arts throughout her career.

Waggoner brings her broad knowledge of Winnebago culture and history to this gracefully written book, which features more than forty illustrations. "Fire Light" shows us both a consummate artist and a fully realized woman, who learned how to traverse the borders of Red identity in a white man's world.