"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.

Conversations with LeAnne Howe is the first collection of interviews with the groundbreaking Choctaw author, whose genre-bending works take place in the US Southeast, Oklahoma, and beyond our national borders to bring Native American characters and themes to the global stage. Best known for her American Book Award-winning novel Shell Shaker (2001), LeAnne Howe (b. 1951) is also a poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, theorist, and humorist. She has held numerous honors including a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship in Amman, Jordan, from 2010 to 2011, and she was the recipient of the Modern Language Association's first Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages for her travelogue, Choctalking on Other Realities (2013). Spanning the period from 2002 to 2020, the interviews in this collection delve deeply into Howe's poetics, her innovative critical methodology of tribalography, her personal history, and her position on subjects ranging from the Lone Ranger to Native American mascots. Two previously unpublished interviews, "'An American in New York': LeAnne Howe" (2019) and "Genre-Sliding on Stage with LeAnne Howe" (2020), explore unexamined areas of her personal history and how it impacted her creative work, including childhood trauma and her incubation as a playwright in the 1980s. These conversations along with 2019's Occult Poetry Radio interview also give important insights on the background of Howe's newest critically acclaimed work, Savage Conversations (2019), about Mary Todd Lincoln's hallucination of a "Savage Indian" during her time in Bellevue Place sanitarium. Taken as a whole, Conversations with LeAnne Howe showcases the development and continued impact of one of the most important Indigenous American writers of the twenty-first century.

Indian freedmen and their descendants have garnered much public and scholarly attention, but women's roles have largely been absent from that discussion. Now a scholar who gained an insider's perspective into the Black Seminole community in Texas and Mexico offers a rare and vivid picture of these women and their contributions. In "Dreaming with the Ancestors," Shirley Boteler Mock explores the role that Black Seminole women have played in shaping and perpetuating a culture born of African roots and shaped by southeastern Native American and Mexican influences.

Mock reveals a unique maroon culture, forged from an eclectic mixture of religious beliefs and social practices. At its core is an amalgam of African-derived traditions kept alive by women. The author interweaves documentary research with extensive interviews she conducted with leading Black Seminole women to uncover their remarkable history. She tells how these women nourished their families and held fast to their Afro-Seminole language -- even as they fled slavery, endured relocation, and eventually sought new lives in new lands. Of key importance were the "warrior women" -- keepers of dreams and visions that bring to life age-old African customs.

Featuring more than thirty illustrations and maps, including historic photographs never before published, "Dreaming with the Ancestors" combines scholarly analysis with human interest to open a new window on both African American and American Indian history and culture.

In this ethnography of Navajo (Dine) popular music culture, Kristina M. Jacobsen examines questions of Indigenous identity and performance by focusing on the surprising and vibrant Navajo country music scene. Through multiple first-person accounts, Jacobsen illuminates country music's connections to the Indigenous politics of language and belonging, examining through the lens of music both the politics of difference and many internal distinctions Dine make among themselves and their fellow Navajo citizens. As the second largest tribe in the United States, the Navajo have often been portrayed as a singular and monolithic entity. Using her experience as a singer, lap steel player, and Navajo language learner, Jacobsen challenges this notion, showing the ways Navajos distinguish themselves from one another through musical taste, linguistic abilities, geographic location, physical appearance, degree of Navajo or Indian blood, and class affiliations. By linking cultural anthropology to ethnomusicology, linguistic anthropology, and critical Indigenous studies, Jacobsen shows how Navajo poetics and politics offer important insights into the politics of Indigeneity in Native North America, highlighting the complex ways that identities are negotiated in multiple, often contradictory, spheres.

The disastrous Buffalo Creek Treaty of 1838 called for the Senecas' removal to Kansas (then part of the Indian Territory). From this low point, the Seneca Nation of Indians, which today occupies three reservations in western New York, sought to rebound. Beginning with events leading to the Seneca Revolution in 1848, which transformed the nation's government from a council of chiefs to an elected system, Laurence M. Hauptman traces Seneca history through the New Deal. Based on the author's nearly fifty years of archival research, interviews, and applied work, Coming Full Circle shows that Seneca leaders in these years learned valuable lessons and adapted to change, thereby preparing the nation to meet the challenges it would face in the post-World War II era, including major land loss and threats of termination. Instead of emphasizing American Indian decline, Hauptman stresses that the Senecas were actors in their own history and demonstrated cultural and political resilience. Both Native belief, in the form of the Good Message of Handsome Lake, and Christianity were major forces in Seneca life; women continued to play important social and economic roles despite the demise of clan matrons' right to nominate the chiefs; and Senecas became involved in national and international competition in long-distance running and in lacrosse. The Seneca Nation also achieved noteworthy political successes in this period. The Senecas resisted allotment, and thus saved their reservations from breakup and sale. They recruited powerful allies, including attorneys, congressmen, journalists, and religious leaders. They saved their Oil Spring Reservation, winning a U.S. Supreme Court case against New York State on the issue of taxation and won remuneration in their Kansas Claims case. These efforts laid the groundwork for the Senecas' postwar endeavor to seek compensation before the Indian Claims Commission and pursuit of a series of land claims and tax lawsuits against New York State.

Now in paperback, the critically acclaimed "Yellow Dirt," "will break your heart. An enormous achievement--literally, a piece of groundbreaking investigative journalism--illustrates exactly what reporting should do: Show us what we've become as a people, and sharpen our vision of who we, the people, ought to become" ( "The Christian Science Monitor" ).
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the United States knowingly used and discarded an entire tribe of people as the Navajos worked, unprotected, in the uranium mines that fueled the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Long after these mines were abandoned, Navajos in all four corners of the Reservation (which borders Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) continued grazing their animals on sagebrush flats riddled with uranium that had been blasted from the ground. They built their houses out of chunks of uranium ore, inhaled radioactive dust borne aloft from the waste piles the mining companies had left behind, and their children played in the unsealed mines themselves. Ten years after the mines closed, the cancer rate on the reservation shot up and some babies began to be born with crooked fingers that fused together into claws as they grew. Government scientists filed complaints about the situation with the government, but were told it was a mess too expensive to clean up.
Judy Pasternak exposed this story in a prizewinning "Los Angeles Times" series. Her work galvanized both a congressman and a famous prosecutor to clean the sites and get reparations for the tribe. "Yellow Dirt" is her powerful chronicle of both the scandal of neglect and the Navajos' fight for justice.