This guide to Native American history and culture outlines new ways of understanding American Indian cultures in contemporary contexts. Native American Studies covers key issues such as the intimate relationship of culture to land; the nature of cultural exchange and conflict in the period after European contact; the unique relationship of Native communities with the United States government; the significance of language; the vitality of contemporary cultures; and the variety of Native artistic styles, from literature and poetry to painting and sculpture to performance arts. This...

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia--unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have "come...