The 1830s forced removal of Cherokees from their southeastern homeland became the most famous event in the Indian history of the American South, an episode taken to exemplify a broader experience of injustice suffered by Native peoples. In this book, Andrew Denson explores the public memory of Cherokee removal through an examination of memorials, historic sites, and tourist attractions dating from the early twentieth century to the present. White southerners, Denson argues, embraced the Trail of Tears as a story of Indian disappearance. Commemorating Cherokee removal affirmed white possession of southern places, while granting them the moral satisfaction of acknowledging past wrongs. During segregation and the struggle over black civil rights, removal memorials reinforced whites' authority to define the South's past and present. Cherokees, however, proved capable of repossessing the removal memory, using it for their own purposes during a time of crucial transformation in tribal politics and U. S. Indian policy. In considering these representations of removal, Denson brings commemoration of the Indian past into the broader discussion of race and memory in the South.

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.

From Argentina to Zimbabwe, the industrialized world's encroachment on native lands has brought disastrous environmental harm to indigenous peoples. More than 170 native peoples around the world are facing life-and-death struggles to maintain environments threatened by oil spills, explosions, toxic chemicals, global warming, and other pollutants. This unique resource surveys those indigenous peoples and the environmental hazards that threaten their existence, providing a wealth of information not readily available elsewhere. Arranged geographically, each entry focuses on the peoples of a particular country and the environmental issues they face, from the global warming and toxic chemicals threatening the Arctic Inuits, to the logging that is devastating indigenous habitats in Borneo. General entries overview such topics as climate change, dam sites, and Native American Concepts of Ecology. The 'Guide to Related Topics' and index provide access to recurring themes such as deforestation, hydroelectric power, mining, and land tenure.

"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.

An anthology of essays on the new syncretic, or 'fusion', styles of music of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific region, who have adopted forms of popular music as an expression of their cultural identity. Its strength lies in the layering up of a sense of community of inquiry, and the fostering of an intertextual head of steam, grounded in a set of empirical, rather than theoretical, concerns. It considers the interrelation between music, popular culture, politics and (national) identity, but also looks at the business aspect of producing and distributing music in the Pacific region.

Born in 1922, Kenny Thomas Sr. has been a trapper, firefighter, road builder, river-freight hauler, and soldier. Today he is a respected elder and member of a northern Athabaskan tribal group residing in Tanacross, Alaska. As a song and dance leader for the Tanacross community, Thomas has been teaching village traditions at an annual culture camp for more than twenty years. Over a three-year period, folklorist Craig Mishler conducted a series of interviews with Thomas about his life experiences. Crow Is My Boss is the fascinating result of this collaboration. Written in a style that reflects the dialogue between Thomas and Mishler, Crow Is My Boss retains the authenticity of Thomas's voice, capturing his honesty and humor. Thomas reveals biographical details, performs and explains traditional folktales and the potlatch tradition, and discusses ghosts and medicine people. One folktale is presented in both English and Tanacross, Thomas's native language. A compelling personal story, Crow Is My Boss provides insight into the traditional and contemporary culture of Tanacross Athabaskans in Alaska.

The indispensable sage, fierce enemy, silent sidekick: the role of Native Americans in film has been largely confined to identities defined by the "white" perspective. Many studies have analyzed these simplistic stereotypes of Native American cultures in film, but few have looked beyond the Hollywood Western for further examples. Distinguished film scholar Edward Buscombe offers here an incisive study that examines cinematic depictions of Native Americans from a global perspective.
Buscombe opens with a historical survey of American Westerns and their controversial portrayals of Native Americans: the wild redmen of nineteenth-century Wild West shows, the more sympathetic depictions of Native Americans in early Westerns, and the shift in the American film industry in the 1920s to hostile characterizations of Indians. Questioning the implicit assumptions of prevailing critiques, Buscombe looks abroad to reveal a distinctly different portrait of Native Americans. He focuses on the lesser known Westerns made in Germany--such as East Germany's "Indianerfilme," in which Native Americans were Third World freedom fighters battling against Yankee imperialists--as well as the films based on the novels of nineteenth-century German writer Karl May. These alternative portrayals of Native Americans offer a vastly different view of their cultural position in American society.
Buscombe offers nothing less than a wholly original and readable account of the cultural images of Native Americans through history andaround the globe, revealing new and complex issues in our understanding of how oppressed peoples have been represented in mass culture.

Samuel Wesley Gathing: A Closer Look is the moving true story of Sam and Beatrice Gathing and the struggles they faced rearing their fourteen children during the era of the Jim Crow laws. These laws meant that both society and the system enforced the damaging view that their children were just stupid black kids. In this climate of institutionalized discrimination, Sam had to maneuver his way through a massive minefield of irrational hatred intended to destroy him and his family.

Sam and Beatrice began their life together in December 1929, in Desoto County, Mississippi, taking the gift of a mule named Rock and a big red cow to start their farm. Over the years, as their family expanded, so did the land that they farmed. Sam learned to live by the rules of the day but was always a true leader to both his family and to his friends. Through all the challenges that Sam encountered, his faith in God never wavered-he believed that the truth could be found in God's words and actions, not in the laws that were meant to harm him and his people.

Many Anglo-Americans in the nineteenth century regarded Indian tribes as little more than illiterate bands of savages in need of "civilizing." Few were willing to recognize that one of the major Southeastern tribes targeted for removal west of the Mississippi already had an advanced civilization with its own system of writing and rich literary tradition. In "Literacy and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820-1906," James W. Parins traces the rise of bilingual literacy and intellectual life in the Cherokee Nation during the nineteenth century--a time of intense social and political turmoil for the tribe.
By the 1820s, Cherokees had perfected a system for writing their language--the syllabary created by Sequoyah--and in a short time taught it to virtually all their citizens. Recognizing the need to master the language of the dominant society, the Cherokee Nation also developed a superior public school system that taught students in English. The result was a literate population, most of whom could read the "Cherokee Phoenix, "the tribal newspaper founded in 1828 and published in both Cherokee and English.
English literacy allowed Cherokee leaders to deal with the white power structure on their own terms: Cherokees wrote legal briefs, challenged members of Congress and the executive branch, and bargained for their tribe as white interests sought to take their land and end their autonomy. In addition, many Cherokee poets, fiction writers, essayists, and journalists published extensively after 1850, paving the way for the rich literary tradition that the nation preserves and fosters today.
"Literary and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820-1906" takes a fascinating look at how literacy served to unite Cherokees during a critical moment in their national history, and advances our understanding of how literacy has functioned as a tool of sovereignty among Native peoples, both historically and today.