Before American History juxtaposes Mexico City's famous carved Sun Stone with the mounded earthworks found throughout the Midwestern states of the U.S. to examine the project of settler nationalism from the 1780s to the 1840s in two North American republics usually studied separately. As the U.S. and Mexico transformed from European colonies into independent nations-and before war scarred them both-antiquarians and historians compiled and interpreted archives meant to document America's Indigenous pasts. These settler-colonial understandings of North America's past deliberately misappropriated Indigenous histories and repurposed them and their material objects as "American antiquities," thereby writing Indigenous pasts out of U.S. and Mexican national histories and national lands and erasing and denigrating Native peoples living in both nascent republics.Christen Mucher creatively recovers the Sun Stone and mounded earthworks as archives of nationalist power and Indigenous dispossession as well as objects that are, at their material base, produced by Indigenous people but settler controlled and settler interpreted. Her approach renders visible the foundational methodologies, materials, and mythologies that created an American history out of and on top of Indigenous worlds and facilitated Native dispossession continent-wide. By writing Indigenous actors out of national histories, Mexican and U.S. elites also wrote them out of their lands, a legacy of erasure and removal that continues when we repeat these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century settler narratives and that reverberates in discussions of immigration, migration, and Nativism today.

Representative Native American religions and rituals are introduced to readers in a way that respects the individual traditions as more than local curiosities or exotic rituals, capturing the flavor of the living, modern traditions, even as commonalities between and among traditions are explored and explained. This general introduction offers wide-ranging coverage of the major factors-geography, history, religious behavior, and religious ideology (theology)-analyzing select traditions that can be dealt with, to varying degrees, on a contemporary basis. As current interest surrounding Native American studies continues to grow, attention has often been given to the various religious beliefs, rituals, and customs of the diverse traditions across the country. But most treatments of the subject are cursory and encyclopedic and do not provide readers with the flavor of the living, modern traditions. Here, representative Native American religions and rituals are introduced to readers in a way that respects the individual traditions as more than local curiosities or exotic rituals, even as commonalities between and among traditions are explored and explained. This general introduction offers wide-ranging coverage of the major factors-geography, history, religious behavior, and religious ideology (theology)-analyzing select traditions that can be dealt with, to varying degrees, on a contemporary basis. Covering such diverse ceremonies as the Muskogee (Creek) Busk, the Northwest Coast Potlatch, the Navajo and Apache menarche rituals, and the Anishnabe (Great Lakes area) Midewiwin seasonal gatherings, Paper takes a comparative approach, based on the study of human religion in general, and the special place of Native American religions within it. His book is informed by perspective gained through nearly fifty years of formal study and several decades of personal involvement, treating readers to a glimpse of the living religious traditions of Native American communities across the country.

Originally published in 1922, this early work on anthropology is both expensive and hard to find in its first edition. It details the lives and customs of the Trobriand who live on an island chain in the western Pacific and is a highly regarded study of their tribal culture. This is a fascinating work and is thoroughly recommended for anyone interested in ethnology. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

From 19th-century trade agreements and treatments to 21st-century reparations, this volume tells the story of the federal agency that shapes and enforces U.S. policy toward Native Americans. Bureau of Indian Affairs tells the fascinating and important story of an agency that currently oversees U.S. policies affecting over 584 recognized tribes, over 326 federally reserved lands, and over 5 million Native American residents. Written by one of our foremost Native American scholars, this insider's view of the BIA looks at the policies and the personalities that shaped its history, and by extension, nearly two centuries of government-tribal relations. Coverage includes the agency's forerunners and founding, the years of relocation and outright war, the movement to encourage Indian urbanization and assimilation, and the civil rights era surge of Indian activism. A concluding chapter looks at the modern BIA and its role in everything from land allotments and Indian boarding schools to tribal self-government, mineral rights, and the rise of the Indian gaming industry. 20 original documents, including the Delaware Treaty of 1778, the Indian Removal Act (1830), and the act of 1871 that halted Indian treaty making Biographies of key figures, including longtime bureau commissioners John Collier and Dillon Myer

Secrets of an Ageless Journey (1997) the journey begins once again when a sixteen year old girl, Sarah, ventures into the mysteries surrounding her grandfather and the family ancestral ranch. While visiting her cousins on the ranch she discovers an old journal written over eighty years before. The journal becomes the focus of her quest for discovering a mysterious influence that is about the family; and in some way guiding her. (1915) the journal takes Sarah back to one summer in the life of her great grandfather, Joseph, and his twin sister, Ida Belle as they experience a similar ancestral stirring in their lives. A great grandmother comes to visit the twins, involving them in a mystery that has haunted her and the clan. It is through the grandmother that the premise of an invisible force and invisible world exist and was essential to the culture and heritage of an American Indian nation.

Representing the first general treatment of the "Indian Mass" of the North American Catholic missions, this volume draws on historical descriptions as well as rare missionary manuscripts and publications to trace the development of the distinctive American Indian liturgies from the early hymn singing of the mid-1600s to the adaptation of vernacular plainchant and polyphony. Weaving together extensive primary source quotations, Salvucci overturns popular misconceptions of missionaries as cultural imperialists, showing instead how native congregations and scholarly priests worked together in adapting the rich traditions of Counter-Reformation Roman Catholicism to the linguistic and cultural needs of the New World.

This significant contribution to Cherokee studies examines the tribe's life during the eighteenth century, up to the Removal. By revealing town loyalties and regional alliances, Tyler Boulware uncovers a persistent identification hierarchy among the colonial Cherokee.
Boulware aims to fill the gap in Cherokee historical studies by addressing two significant aspects of Cherokee identity: town and region. Though other factors mattered, these were arguably the most recognizable markers by which Cherokee peoples structured group identity and influenced their interactions with outside groups during the colonial era.
This volume focuses on the understudied importance of social and political ties that gradually connected villages and regions and slowly weakened the localism that dominated in earlier decades. It highlights the importance of borderland interactions to Cherokee political behavior and provides a nuanced investigation of the issue of Native American identity, bringing geographic relevance and distinctions to the topic.

This book presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation in critical areas in the Americas. An important contribution to evolving studies on conservation of sacred natural sites (SNS), the book elucidates the complexity of development scenarios within cultural landscapes related to the appropriation of religion, environmental change in indigenous territories, and new conservation management approaches. Indigeneity and the Sacred explores how these struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reconstituted as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.

"Explores colonial Spanish-Apache relations in the Southwest borderlands"

More than two centuries after the Coronado Expedition first set foot in the region, the northern frontier of New Spain in the late 1770s was still under attack by Apache raiders. Mark Santiago's gripping account of Spanish efforts to subdue the Apaches illuminates larger cultural and political issues in the colonial period of the Southwest and northern Mexico. To persuade the Apaches to abandon their homelands and accept Christian "civilization," Spanish officials employed both the mailed fist of continuous war and the velvet glove of the reservation system. "Hostiles" captured by the Spanish would be deported, while Apaches who agreed to live in peace near the Spanish presidios would receive support. Santiago's history of the deportation policy includes vivid descriptions of "colleras," the chain gangs of Apache prisoners of war bound together for the two-month journey by mule and on foot from the northern frontier to Mexico City. The book's arresting title, "The Jar of Severed Hands," comes from a 1792 report documenting a desperate break for freedom made by a group of Apache prisoners. After subduing the prisoners and killing twelve Apache men, the Spanish soldiers verified the attempted breakout by amputating the left hands of the dead and preserving them in a jar for display to their superiors.

Santiago's nuanced analysis of deportation policy credits both the Apaches' ability to exploit the Spanish government's dual approach and the growing awareness on the Spaniards' part that the peoples they referred to as Apaches were a disparate and complex assortment of tribes that could not easily be subjugated. "The Jar of Severed Hands" deepens our understanding of the dynamics of the relationship between Indian tribes and colonial powers in the Southwest borderlands.