At the heart of this landmark collection of essays rests a single question: What impact, good or bad, immediate or long-range, did Lewis and Clark's journey have on the Indians whose homelands they traversed? The nine writers in this volume each provide their own unique answers; from Pulitzer prize-winner N. Scott Momaday, who offers a haunting essay evoking the voices of the past; to Debra Magpie Earling's illumination of her ancestral family, their survival, and the magic they use to this day; to Mark N. Trahant's attempt to trace his own blood back to Clark himself; and Roberta Conner's comparisons of the explorer's journals with the accounts of the expedition passed down to her. Incisive and compelling, these essays shed new light on our understanding of this landmark journey into the American West.

Nez Perce Summer, 1877 tells the story of a people’s epic struggle to survive spiritually, culturally, and physically in the face of unrelenting military force. Written by one of the foremost experts in frontier military history, Jerome A. Greene, and reviewed by members of the Nez Perce tribe, this definitive treatment of the Nez Perce War is the first to incorporate research from all known accounts of Nez Perce and U.S. military participants. Enhanced by sixteen detailed maps and forty-nine historic photographs, Greene’s gripping narrative takes readers on a three-and-one-half month 1,700-mile journey across the wilds of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana territories. All of the skirmishes and battles of the war receive detailed treatment, which benefits from Greene’s astute analysis of the strategies and decision making on both sides. Between 100 and 150 of the more than 800 Nez Perce men, women, and children who began the trek were killed during the war. Almost as many died in the months following the surrender, after they were exiled to malaria-ridden northeastern Oklahoma. Army deaths numbered 113. The casualties on both sides were an extraordinary price for a war that nobody wanted but whose history has since fascinated generations of Americans.  

In this book one of America's leading writers of Indian History examines the aspirations and feelings of today's Indians-what they want and why they want it. Using the particular histories of seven Indian tribes or groups, Alvin Josephy analyzes seven principal issues in the continuing face-off between Indians and Whites:

- The Indians' will to endure as Indians

- Racial sterotypes that influence Whites' treatment of Indians

- Indians' efforts to retain the deep spiritual basis of their lives

- The fight to retain tribal land bases

- Reassertion of Indian water rights

- Claims to fishing and hunting rights

- The modern-day quest for self-termination, sovereignty, and control of tribal affairs and resources

Those themes are the major aspects of contemporary Indian affairs that are least understood by non-Indians and tend to cause continued misunderstanding and conflicts with Whites.

Red Power is a classic documentary history of the American Indian activist movement. This landmark second edition considerably expands and updates the original, illustrating the development of American Indian political activism from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century.

Included in the fifty selections are influential statements by Indian organizations and congressional committees, the texts of significant laws, and the articulate voices of individuals such as Clyde Warrior, Vine Deloria Jr., Dennis Banks, Wilma Mankiller, Ada Deer, and Russell Means. The selections are organized around key issues: the nature of the original Red Power protest; tribal identity, self-determination, and sovereignty; land claims and economic development; cultural traditions and spirituality; education; and reservation conditions.

Is there any chapter in American history more dramatic than that of the Northwest from the time of Lewis and Clark to the tragic defeat of Chief Joseph in 1877? Heroic - and not so heroic -characters abound: explorers, fur traders, miners, settlers, missionaries, ranchers, Indian chiefs and their tribespeople. Now, when interest in Lewis and Clark and the American Northwest has never been higher, comes the first complete and unabridged paperback edition of Alvin Josephy's masterwork.

As most Americans of the 1860s fixed their attention on the battlefields of Shiloh and Manassas, another war raged on the largely unsettled Western frontier. This splendid work by the author of The Patriot Chiefs restores this "other" Civil War to its true, epic proportions. With formidable scholarship and irresistible narrative ease, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., tells of the Yankee armada that foundered in the Louisiana bayous; of the bloody fighting on the ridges and prairies of the border states. where a Cherokee guerrilla leader was the last Confederate general to surrender -- two months after Appomattox: and of the U.S. Army's brutal campaigns against the Plains Indians in theaters as far apart as Minnesota and Colorado.

The rivers, canyons, and prairies of the Columbia Basin are the homeland of the Nez Perce. The Nez Perce, or Nimiipuu, inhabited much of what is now north central Idaho and portions of Oregon and Washington for thousands of years. The story of how western settlement drastically affected the Nimiipuu is one of the great and at times tragic sagas of American history. Renowned western historian Alvin M. Josephy Jr. describes the Nimiipuu's attachment to the land and their way of life, religion, and vibrant culture. He also chronicles the western expansion that displaced them, beginning with the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1805 and followed by the influx of traders and trappers, then miners and farmers. Josephy traces the ill fortune of the Nez Perce as their homeland was carved up by treaties, creating an atmosphere of hostility that would culminate in the Nez Perce war of 1877 and conclude with Chief Joseph's famous pronouncement: "I will fight no more forever." Despite the challenges of the past, the Nimiipuu have maintained their ties to the land. In his introduction to the book, Jeremy FiveCrows details how the tribe has fought for self government to undo the damage wrought by shortsighted practices.

Stanley Lyman, who was the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) superintendent at the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1973, gives an inside view of what happened when the American Indian Movement (AIM) activists occupied the village of Wounded Knee. Close to the action, he recorded it with unusual candor, directing his sorrow, frustration, and occasional anger to all parties involved--the Tribal Council, the Justice Department, the BIA, FBI, and AIM. His account of the besiegers and besieged reveals a well-meaning and intelligent man forced by dramatic events to reevaluate some long-cherished assumptions. It deserves to be read and studied in any attempt to understand fully Wounded Knee II.

"Red Power" is a classic documentary history of the American Indian activist movement. This landmark second edition considerably expands and updates the original, illustrating the development of American Indian political activism from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century. Included in the fifty selections are influential statements by Indian organizations and congressional committees, the texts of significant laws, and the articulate voices of individuals such as Clyde Warrior, Vine Deloria Jr., Dennis Banks, Wilma Mankiller, Ada Deer, and Russell Means. The selections are organized around key issues: the nature of the original Red Power protest; tribal identity, self-determination, and sovereignty; land claims and economic development; cultural traditions and spirituality; education; and reservation conditions.