"Negotiators of Change" is one of the most original and innovative volumes to explore the terrain of Native American women's history. The essays included span the period between the seventeenth century and the present, focusing on the significance of gender in Native American and Euro-American interactions. The contributors present new historical sources, methods and interpretations that enhance our understanding of Indian women's reactions to the changes introduced by Euro-American contact and conquest.
"Negotiators of Change" covers the history of ten tribal groups including the Cherokee, Iroquois and Navajo as well as tribes with less known histories such as the Yakima, Ute, and Pima-Maricopa. The book contests the idea that European colonization let to a loss of Native American women's power, and instead presents a more complex picture of the zdaptation to, and subversion of the economic changes introduced by Europeans. The essays also discuss the changing meanings of motherhood, women'sroles, and differing gender ideologies within this context.
Contributors: Helen M. Bannan, Kathleen Brown, Paivi Hoikkala, Harry A. Kersey, Jr., Clara Sue Kidwell, Lucy Murphy, Katherine M.B. Osburn, Theda Perdue, Nancy Shoemaker, Carol Sparks, Clifford E. Trafzer

The discipline of American Indian history is ready for theory, and Clearing a Path will make its introduction possible. Bringing together many of the most important scholars in the field, the volume draws on cultural studies and anthropology to put methodological concerns first. The book looks at Gender, race, material culture, comparative global perspecticves and linguistic analysis to make it a comprehensive referece tool.

The discipline of American Indian history is ready for theory, and Clearing a Path will make its introduction possible. Bringing together many of the most important scholars in the field, the volume draws on cultural studies and anthropology to put methodological concerns first. The book looks at Gender, race, material culture, comparative global perspecticves and linguistic analysis to make it a comprehensive referece tool.

Negotiators of Change covers the history of ten tribal groups including the Cherokee, Iroquois, Navajo - as well as tribes with less known histories such as the Yakima, Ute, and Pima-Maricopa. The book contests the idea that European colonization led to a loss of Native American women's power, and instead presents a more complex picture of the adaption to, and subversion of the economic changes introduced by Europeans. The essays also discuss the changing meanings of motherhood, women's roles, and differing gender ideologies within this context.

Full of colorful details and engrossing stories, Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles shows that the aspirations of individual Americans to be recognized as people worthy of others' respect was a driving force in the global extension of United States influence shortly after the nation's founding. Nancy Shoemaker contends that what she calls extraterritorial Americans constituted the vanguard of a vast, early US global expansion. Using as her site of historical investigation nineteenth-century Fiji, the "cannibal isles" of American popular culture, she uncovers stories of Americans looking for opportunities to rise in social status and enhance their sense of self. Prior to British colonization in 1874, extraterritorial Americans had, she argues, as much impact on Fiji as did the British. While the American economy invested in the extraction of sandalwood and sea slugs as resources to sell in China, individuals who went to Fiji had more complicated, personal objectives. Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles considers these motivations through the lives of the three Americans who left the deepest imprint on Fiji: a runaway whaleman who settled in the islands, a sea captain's wife, and a merchant. Shoemaker's book shows how ordinary Americans living or working overseas found unusual venues where they could show themselves worthy of others' respect-others' approval, admiration, or deference.

The relationship between American Indians and Europeans on America's frontiers is typically characterized as a series of cultural conflicts and misunderstandings based on a vast gulf of difference. Nancy Shoemaker turns this notion on its head, showing that Indians and Europeans shared common beliefs about their most fundamental realities-land as national territory, government, record-keeping, international alliances, gender, and the human body. Before they even met, Europeans and Indians shared perceptions of a landscape marked by mountains and rivers, a physical world in which the sun rose and set every day, and a human body with its own distinctive shape. They also shared in their ability to make sense of it all and to invent new, abstract ideas based on the tangible and visible experiences of daily life. Focusing on eastern North America up through the end of the Seven Years War, Shoemaker closely reads incidents, letters, and recorded speeches from the Iroquois and Creek confederacies, the Cherokee Nation, and other Native groups alongside British and French sources, paying particular attention to the language used in cross-cultural conversation. Paradoxically, the more American Indians and Europeans came to know each other, the more they came to see each other as different. By the end of the 18th century, Shoemaker argues, they abandoned an initial willingness to recognize in each other a common humanity and instead developed new ideas rooted in the conviction that, by custom and perhaps even by nature, Native Americans and Europeans were peoples fundamentally at odds. In her analysis, Shoemaker reveals the 18th century roots of enduring stereotypes Indians developed about Europeans, as well as stereotypes Europeans created about Indians. This powerful and eloquent interpretation questions long-standing assumptions, revealing the strange likenesses among the inhabitants of colonial North America.

In the nineteenth century, nearly all Native American men living along the southern New England coast made their living traveling the world's oceans on whaleships. Many were career whalemen, spending twenty years or more at sea. Their labor invigorated economically depressed reservations with vital income and led to complex and surprising connections with other Indigenous peoples, from the islands of the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean. At home, aboard ship, or around the world, Native American seafarers found themselves in a variety of situations, each with distinct racial expectations about who was ""Indian"" and how ""Indians"" behaved. Treated by their white neighbors as degraded dependents incapable of taking care of themselves, Native New Englanders nevertheless rose to positions of command at sea. They thereby complicated myths of exploration and expansion that depicted cultural encounters as the meeting of two peoples, whites and Indians. Highlighting the shifting racial ideologies that shaped the lives of these whalemen, Nancy Shoemaker shows how the category of ""Indian"" was as fluid as the whalemen were mobile.

A resource for all who teach and study history, this book illuminates the unmistakable centrality of American Indian history to the full sweep of American history. The nineteen essays gathered in this collaboratively produced volume, written by leading scholars in the field of Native American history, reflect the newest directions of the field and are organized to follow the chronological arc of the standard American history survey. Contributors reassess major events, themes, groups of historical actors, and approaches--social, cultural, military, and political--consistently demonstrating how Native American people, and questions of Native American sovereignty, have animated all the ways we consider the nation's past. The uniqueness of Indigenous history, as interwoven more fully in the American story, will challenge students to think in new ways about larger themes in U.S. history, such as settlement and colonization, economic and political power, citizenship and movements for equality, and the fundamental question of what it means to be an American. Contributors are Juliana Barr, Susan Sleeper-Smith, James D. Rice, Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Adam Jortner, Robert J. Miller, Jean M. O'Brien, Paul T. Conrad, Scott Manning Stevens, Jeffrey Ostler, Phillip H. Round, Mindy J. Morgan, John J. Laukaitis, David R. M. Beck, Rosalyn R. LaPier, Jacob Betz, Andrew Needham, Mikal Brotnov Eckstrom, Margaret D. Jacobs, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, and Chris Andersen.

Although the general public is not widely aware of this trend, American Indian population has grown phenomenally since 1900, their demographic nadir. No longer a "vanishing" race, Indians have rebounded to 1492 population estimates in nine decades. Until now, most research has focused on catastrophic population decline, but Nancy Shoemaker studies how and why American Indians have recovered. Her analysis of the social, cultural, and economic implications of the family and demographic patterns fueling the recovery compares five different Indian groups: the Seneca Nation in New York State, Cherokees in Oklahoma, Red Lake Ojibways in Minnesota, Yakamas in Washington State, and Navajos in the Southwest. Marshaling individual-level census data, Shoemaker places American Indians in a broad social and cultural context and compares their demographic patterns to those of Euroamericans and African Americans in the United States.