Canaan Creek, South Carolina, in the 1950s is a tiny town where the close-knit African-American community is united by long-term friendships and church ties. Bonnie Wilder has lived here, on Blackberry Corner, all her life, and would be content but for her deep desire to have a child. She and her husband Naz cannot conceive, and he refuses to adopt. Even the support of her outrageous best friend Thora--to whom Bonnie tells everything--can't help fill the emptiness inside her.
Then Naz finds a blanketed infant on the banks of Canaan Creek, and suddenly Bonnie's life is transformed. She has...

Argues that previous accounts of religious and political activism in the Native American community fail to account for the variety of positions held by this community.

In "Native Americans and the Christian Right," Andrea Smith advances social movement theory beyond simplistic understandings of social-justice activism as either right-wing or left-wing and urges a more open-minded approach to the role of religion in social movements. In examining the interplay of biblical scripture, gender, and nationalism in Christian Right and Native American activism, Smith rethinks the nature of political strategy and alliance-building for progressive purposes, highlighting the potential of unlikely alliances, termed "cowboys and Indians coalitions" by one of her Native...

Afraid to Sleep by Aunjee is an important memoir in the vein of The Boy Called It and Screams from Childhood. As the author shares her heartbreaking story of abandonment through prose and poetry, she sheds light on a foster care system that failed her repeatedly and completely. After the death of her father, Aunjee and her siblings were left to their own devices except for the terror they met at the hands of their mother, an emotionally unavailable woman with an explosive temper. When the courts deemed her unfit, the two sisters and two brothers were scattered between family and foster homes....

This important collection makes a compelling argument for the importance of theory in Native studies. Within the field, there has been understandable suspicion of theory stemming both from concerns about urgent political issues needing to take precedence over theoretical speculations and from hostility toward theory as an inherently Western, imperialist epistemology. The editors of Theorizing Native Studies take these concerns as the ground for recasting theoretical endeavors as attempts to identify the larger institutional and political structures that enable racism, inequities, and...

This important collection makes a compelling argument for the importance of theory in Native studies. Within the field, there has been understandable suspicion of theory stemming both from concerns about urgent political issues needing to take precedence over theoretical speculations and from hostility toward theory as an inherently Western, imperialist epistemology. The editors of Theorizing Native Studies take these concerns as the ground for recasting theoretical endeavors as attempts to identify the larger institutional and political structures that enable racism, inequities, and...

Native Studies Keywords explores selected concepts in Native studies and the words commonly used to describe them, words whose meanings have been insufficiently examined. This edited volume focuses on the following eight concepts: sovereignty, land, indigeneity, nation, blood, tradition, colonialism, and indigenous knowledge. Each section includes three or four essays and provides definitions, meanings, and significance to the concept, lending a historical, social, and political context.

Take sovereignty, for example. The word has served as the battle cry for social justice in...

In this revolutionary text, prominent Native American studies scholar and activist Andrea Smith reveals the connections between different forms of violence--perpetrated by the state and by society at large--and documents their impact on Native women. Beginning with the impact of the abuses inflicted on Native American children at state-sanctioned boarding schools from the 1880s to the 1980s, Smith adroitly expands our conception of violence to include the widespread appropriation of Indian cultural practices by whites and other non-Natives; environmental racism; and population control. Smith...