Non-Indians have amassed extensive records of Shawnee leaders dating back to the era between the French and Indian War and the War of 1812. But academia has largely ignored the stories of these leaders' descendants - including accounts from the Shawnees' own perspectives. The Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma focuses on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century experiences of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe, presenting a new brand of tribal history made possible by the emergence of tribal communities' own research centers and the resources afforded by the digital age. Offering various perspectives on the history of the Eastern Shawnees, this volume combines essays by leading and emerging scholars of Shawnee history with contributions by Eastern Shawnee citizens and interviews with tribal elders. Editor Stephen Warren introduces the collection, acknowledging that the questions and concerns of colonizers have dominated the themes of American Indian history for far too long. The essays that follow introduce readers to the story of the Eastern Shawnees and consider treaties with the U.S. government, laws impacting the tribe, and tribal leadership. They analyze the Eastern Shawnees' ways of telling the tribe's stories, detail Shawnee experiences of federal boarding schools, and recount stories of their chiefs. The book concludes with five tribal members' life histories, told in their own words. The Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma is the culmination of years of collaboration between tribal citizens and Native as well as non-Native scholars. Providing a fuller, more nuanced, and more complete portrayal of Native American historical experiences, this book serves as a resource for both future scholars and tribal members to reconstruct the Eastern Shawnee past and thereby better understand the present. This book was made possible through generous funding from the Administration for Native Americans.

Charles Cornelius Coffin Painter (1833-89), clergyman turned reformer, was one of the foremost advocates and activists in the late-nineteenth-century movement to reform U.S. Indian policy. Very few individuals possessed the influence Painter wielded in the movement, and Painter himself published numerous pamphlets for the Indian Rights Association (IRA) on the Southern Utes, Eastern Cherokees, California Indians, and other Native peoples. Yet this is the first book to fully consider his unique role and substantial contribution. Born in Virginia, Painter spent most of his life in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, commuting to New York City and Washington, D.C., initially as an agent of the American Missionary Association (AMA), later as an appointed member of the Board of Indian Commissions (BIC), and most significant, as the Indian Rights Association's D.C. agent. In these capacities he lobbied presidents and Congress for reform, conducted extensive investigations on reservations, and shaped deliberations in such reform bodies as the BIC and the influential Lake Mohonk conferences. Mining an extraordinary wealth of archival material, Valerie Sherer Mathes crafts a compelling account of Painter as a skilled negotiator with Indians and policymakers and as a tireless investigator who traveled to far-flung reservations, corresponded with countless Indian agents, and drafted scrupulously researched reports on his findings. Recounted in detail, his many adventures and behind-the-scenes activities - promoting education, striving to prevent the removal of the Southern Utes from Colorado, investigating reservation fraud, working to save the Piegans of Montana from starvation - afford a clear picture of Painter's importance to the overall reform effort to incorporate Native Americans into the fabric of American life. No other book so effectively captures the day-to-day and exhausting work of a single individual on the front lines of reform. Like most of his fellow advocates, Painter was an unapologetic assimilationist, a man of his times whose story is a key chapter in the history of the Indian reform movement.

Author Frank Kaye, WW II combat war dog, just won't quit. His previous book What the Hell Is Going On (Amazon.com) based on the declining lifestyles in America put to rest. He resumes his outrage in this new work.

The Volcano Is Our Home When Alan Akana realized he had missed the gift of hearing many of his family's stories, his search for his history became a gift to all his readers. The Volcano is Our Home introduces us in a very personal way to the influences that shaped Hawaii from an isolated group of islands inhabited by remarkable people with a unique and beautiful culture into the tourist mecca known today by travelers from all over the world. The author takes you to the real Hawaii, so that you may walk these islands with new understanding of the lost way of life of those who have gone before. You will journey over 250 years with a Hawaiian family, guided by their connection to the land, each other and a rich spiritual realm. You will join them on the slopes of Kilauea Volcano as they confront the arrival of each new wave of change-from Captain Cook to the missionaries, to the overthrow of the kingdom, to the 50th State, to the 21st century. Alan Akana is one of the current generation of Hawaiians who has perfected the art of "talking story." -Gail Larsen, Founder of Real Speaking and Author of Transformational Speaking: If You Want to Change the World, Tell a Better Story An Excerpt from the Book: "My ancestors simply could not ignore the goddess who lived among them and continued to appear in their midst. As the culture changed dramatically, Pele was a constant presence from generation to generation. While villages disappeared, species became extinct, churches were established, and governments were stolen, the relationship between the people who lived on the slopes of Kilauea and Pele remained firm as ever; and the people continued to make sacrifices and prayers to her in the same way as their ancestors did centuries before them."

Explores the meaning of writing in the post postmodernist moment when master narratives have been questioned and the very act of representing others has been problematized, and discusses some of the key theoretical debates emerging in the aftermath of what came to be known as the postmodernist crisis.

When the author first went to Botswana in the early 1980s to study the impact a major land reform had on rural life in this impoverished African country, social theory and ethnographic practice seemed solid and convincing. A decade later, and again in 1999, she returned to Bostwana and to the Tswapong people whose lives she had shared, and she encountered not only a rapidly shifting social reality, but she also began to ask questions that stemmed from and were shaped by theoretical frames quite different from those she had employed in her earlier work.

At the center of the narrative that runs through this study is a critical reflexive discussion that explores the tension between data recorded at a particular historical moment and the interpretive frames offered to make sense of such data.

Explore the history and tradition of Wabanaki art.

In fact, Kurds in Turkey have many diverse political and ideological orientations. Focusing on the elites of these informal groups - national, religious and economic - Cuma Cicek analyses the consequences of the divisions and subsequent prospects of consensus building. Using an innovative theoretical framework founded on constructivism, the 'three 'I's' model and various strands of sociology, Cicek considers the dynamics that affect the Kurds in Turkey across issues as diverse as the central state, geopolitics, nationalism, Europeanisation and globalisation. In so doing, he examines the consensus-building process of 1999-2015 and presents the possible route to a unified Kurdish political state.Cicek's in-depth and meticulously researched work adds an indispensable layer of nuance to our conception of the Kurdish community. This is an important book for students or researchers with an interest in the history and present of the Kurds and their future in Turkey and across the Middle East.

River-cane baskets woven by the Chitimachas of south Louisiana are universally admired for their beauty and workmanship. Recounting friendships that Chitimacha weaver Christine Paul (1874-1946) sustained with two non-Native women at different parts of her life, this book offers a rare vantage point into the lives of American Indians in the segregated South. Mary Bradford (1869-1954) and Caroline Dormon (1888-1971) were not only friends of Christine Paul; they were also patrons who helped connect Paul and other Chitimacha weavers with buyers for their work. Daniel H. Usner uses Paul's letters to Bradford and Dormon to reveal how Indian women, as mediators between their own communities and surrounding outsiders, often drew on accumulated authority and experience in multicultural negotiation to forge new relationships with non-Indian women. Bradford's initial interest in Paul was philanthropic, while Dormon's was anthropological. Both certainly admired the artistry of Chitimacha baskets. For her part, Paul saw in Bradford and Dormon opportunities to promote her basketry tradition and expand a network of outsiders sympathetic to her tribe's vulnerability on many fronts. As Usner explores these friendships, he touches on a range of factors that may have shaped them, including class differences, racial attitudes, and shared ideals of womanhood. The result is an engaging story of American Indian livelihood, identity, and self-determination.

In this edited volume, Theda Perdue, a nationally known expert on Indian history and southern women's history, offers a rich collection of biographical essays on Native American women. From Pocahontas, a Powhatan woman of the seventeenth century, to Ada Deer, the Menominee woman who headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1990s, the essays span four centuries. Each one recounts the experiences of women from vastly different cultural traditions--the hunting and gathering of Kumeyaay culture of Delfina Cuero, the pueblo society of San Ildefonso potter Maria Martinez, and the powerful matrilineal kinship system of Molly Brant's Mohawks. Contributors focus on the ways in which different women have fashioned lives that remain firmly rooted in their identity as Native women. Perdue's introductory essay ties together the themes running through the biographical sketches, including the cultural factors that have shaped the lives of Native women, particularly economic contributions, kinship, and belief, and the ways in which historical events, especially in United States Indian policy, have engendered change.

At the dawn of the 1700s the Natchez viewed the first Francophones in the Lower Mississippi Valley as potential inductees to their chiefdom. This mistaken perception lulled them into permitting these outsiders to settle among them. Within two decades conditions in Natchez Country had taken a turn for the worse. The trickle of wayfarers had given way to a torrent of colonists (and their enslaved Africans) who refused to recognize the Natchez's hierarchy. These newcomers threatened to seize key authority-generating features of Natchez Country: mounds, a plaza, and a temple. This threat inspired these Indians to turn to a recent import-racial categories-to re-establish social order. They began to call themselves "red men" to reunite their polity and to distance themselves from the "blacks" and "whites" into which their neighbours divided themselves. After refashioning their identity, they launched an attack that destroyed the nearby colonial settlements. Their 1729 assault began a two-year war that resulted in the death or enslavement of most of the Natchez people. In Natchez Country, George Edward Milne provides the most comprehensive history of the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Natchez to date. From La Salle's first encounter with what would become Louisiana to the ultimate dispersal of the Natchez by the close of the 1730s, Milne also analyses the ways in which French attitudes about race and slavery influenced native North American Indians in the vicinity of French colonial settlements on the Mississippi River and how Native Americans in turn adopted and resisted colonial ideology.

Looking Back and Living Forward: Indigenous Research Rising Up brings together research from a diverse group of scholars from a variety of disciplines. The work shared in this book is done by and with Indigenous peoples, from across Canada and around the world. Together, the collaborators' voices resonate with urgency and insights towards resistance and resurgence. The various chapters address historical legacies, environmental concerns, community needs, wisdom teachings, legal issues, personal journeys, educational implications, and more. In these offerings, the contributors share the findings from their literature surveys, document analyses, community-based projects, self-studies, and work with knowledge keepers and elders. The scholarship draws on the teachings of the past, experiences of the present, and will undoubtedly inform research to come.

The Indian sale of Manhattan is one of the world's most cherished legends. Few people know that the Indians who made the fabled sale were Munsees whose ancestral homeland lay between the lower Hudson and upper Delaware river valleys. The story of the Munsee people has long lain unnoticed in broader histories of the Delaware Nation.

Now, "The Munsee Indians" deftly interweaves a mass of archaeological, anthropologi-cal, and archival source material to resurrect the lost history of this forgotten people, from their earliest contacts with Europeans to their final expulsion just before the American Revolution. Anthropologist Robert S. Grumet rescues from obscurity Mattano, Tackapousha, Mamanuchqua, and other Munsee sachems whose influence on Dutch and British settlers helped shape the course of early American history in the mid-Atlantic heartland. He looks past the legendary sale of Manhattan to show for the first time how Munsee leaders forestalled land-hungry colonists by selling small tracts whose vaguely worded and bounded titles kept courts busy--and settlers out--for more than 150 years.

Ravaged by disease, war, and alcohol, the Munsees finally emigrated to reservations in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Ontario, where most of their descendants still live today. Coinciding with the four hundredth anniversary of Hudson's voyage to the river that bears his name, this book shows how Indians and settlers struggled, in land deals and other transactions, to reconcile cultural ideals with political realities. The result is the most authoritative treatment of the Munsee experience--one that restores this people to their place in history.

"This book is published with the generous assistance of Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund."

Writer Lisa Jones went to Wyoming for a four-day magazine assignment. She was committed to a long-term relationship, building a career, and searching for something she could not name.
At a dusty corral on the Wind River Indian Reservation, she met Stanford Addison, a Northern Arapaho who seemed to transform everything around him. He gentled horses rather than breaking them. It was said he could heal people of everything from cancer to bipolar disorder. He did all this from a wheelchair; he had been a quadriplegic for more than twenty years.
Intrigued, Lisa sat at Stanford's kitchen table and watched. And she listened to his story. Stanford spent his teenage years busting broncos, seducing girls, and dealing drugs. At twenty, he left the house for another night of partying. By morning, a violent accident had robbed him of his physical prowess and left in its place unwelcome spiritual powers--an exchange so shocking that Stanford spent several years trying to kill himself. Eventually he surrendered to his new life and mysterious gifts. Over the years Lisa was a frequent visitor to Stanford's place, the reservation and its people worked on her, exposing and healing the places where she, too, was broken. This is her story, intertwined with Stanford's, and it explores powerful spirits, material poverty, spiritual wealth, friendship, violence, confusion, death, and above all else, love.