Kategoria BISAC: History >> Indigenous Peoples of the Americas

There s no excuse for getting lost these days satellite maps on our computers can chart our journey in detail and electronics on our car dashboards instruct us which way to turn. But there was a time when the varied landscape of North America was largely undocumented, and expeditions like that of Lewis and Clark set out to map its expanse. As John Rennie Short argues in Cartographic Encounters, that mapping of the New World was only possible due to a unique relationship between the indigenous inhabitants and the explorers.

In this vital reinterpretation of American history,...

Adam Fortunate Eagle has been called many things: social activist, serious joke medicine, contrary warrior, national treasure, enemy of the state, living history. Characterizing his style as "Fortunate Eagle meets Mark Twain, Indian style," the author relates the traditions, joys, and frustrations of his own Native American experience in tones ranging from "gut-busting laughter to pissed-off anger."

Leading the reader through time and space, Fortunate Eagle uses his own history--as a child in an Ojibwe community and later as a civil rights leader who, among other achievements, helped...

Based on a sweeping range of archival, visual, and material evidence, "Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians" examines perceptions of Indians in French colonial Louisiana and demonstrates that material culture especially dress was central to the elaboration of discourses about race.

At the heart of France's seventeenth-century plans for colonizing New France was a formal policy Frenchification. Intended to turn Indians into Catholic subjects of the king, it also carried with it the belief that Indians could become French through religion, language, and culture. This fluid and mutable...

An excellent introduction to the many complexities and facets of powwows. It entices the reader to recognize the importance of bodies in motion in particular, dance in forging social worlds and mediating power relations. Zoila Mendoza, author of Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru

An outstanding interpretation of Native American powwow dancing that reveals its significance in the context of colonial and postcolonial history and across cultures and borders. As dancer and dance scholar, Axtmann brings a keen eye and her own kinesthetic...

In the fall of 1764, Col. Henry Bouquet led a British-American army into what is today eastern Ohio with the intention of ending the border conflict called "Pontiac's War." Brokering a truce without violence and through negotiations, he ordered the Delawares and Shawnees to release all of their European and Colonial American captives. For the indigenous Ohio peoples, nothing was more wrenching and sorrowful than returning children from mixed parentage and adopted members of their families, many of whom had no memory of their former status or were unwilling to relinquish Native American...

During the colonial period, thousands of North American Native peoples traveled to Cuba independently as traders, diplomats, missionary candidates, immigrants, or refugees; others were forcibly transported as captives, slaves, indentured laborers, or prisoners of war. Over the half millennium after Spanish contact, Cuba served as the principal destination and residence of peoples as diverse as the Yucatec Mayas of Mexico; the Calusa, Timucua, Creek, and Seminole peoples of Florida; and the Apache and Puebloan cultures of the northern provinces of New Spain. In this first history of the...

The life of William Apess (1798--1839), a Pequot Indian, Methodist preacher, and widely celebrated writer, provides a lens through which to comprehend the complex dynamics of indigenous survival and resistance in the era of America's early nationhood. Apess's life intersects with multiple aspects of indigenous identity and existence in this period, including indentured servitude, slavery, service in the armed forces, syncretic engagements with Christian spirituality, and Native struggles for political and cultural autonomy. Even more, Apess offers a powerful and provocative voice for the...

The life of William Apess (1798-1839), a Pequot Indian, Methodist preacher, and widely celebrated writer, provides a lens through which to comprehend the complex dynamics of indigenous survival and resistance in the era of America's early nationhood. Apess's life intersects with multiple aspects of indigenous identity and existence in this period, including indentured servitude, slavery, service in the armed forces, syncretic engagements with Christian spirituality, and Native struggles for political and cultural autonomy. Even more, Apess offers a powerful and provocative voice for the...

In 1881, two German geographers were on their way to the continental United States from the Bering Sea Coast when they came upon a Native population in southeast Alaska that had formed a society far more complex than those of most other North American tribes. Upon return to Germany, Aurel Krause published "The Tlingit Indians." In it were rich, detailed descriptions of the Tlingit kinship system, societal structure, village and family life, customs and traditions, subsistence living, arts and crafts, mythology and shamanism, a language glossary, and an extensive bibliography. Aurel's...