Showing titles in Indigenous Peoples

Chief Tecumseh of the Shawnee people addresses other Native American chiefs, to rally them into resistance against encroachment by the US government. He calls for unity against an enemy that is too strong for any individual tribe to resist. The speech ends with an emotional call for the Native Americans to form one body, one heart, and to defend to the last warrior their country, their homes, their liberty, and the graves of their fathers.

Most claims of Native American ancestry rest on the mother's ethnicity. This can be verified by a DNA test determining what type of mitochondrial DNA she passed to you. A hundred participants in DNA Consultants multi-phase Cherokee DNA Study did just that. What they had in common is they were previously rejected - by commercial firms, genealogy groups, government agencies and tribes. Their mitochondrial DNA was not classified as Native American. These are the "anomalous" Cherokee.

The Pawnee Indians were a fierce, proud, and determined people who called themselves the "men of men". Though there are many Native American tribes to learn about, the Pawnees were unique in many ways; they were a peace-loving, agricultural people with permanent settlements in what is now Nebraska. They dedicated themselves to their gods, the stars, and even arranged their villages according to important star clusters.

In 1550-51, Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, in the Valladolid Debate, attempted to settle the issue of whether or not Native Americans should have been enslaved, given sanction by the Pope. Both carefully argued their sides, las Casas stating emphatically, through his "Apología", that Native Americans were not all uncivilized and that only Canaanite tribes could be enslaved.

When he died in 1904, most Americans who knew his people's story considered Chief Joseph a military genius and an "Indian Napoleon". This assessment of the Native American leader was based on a 1,500-mile odyssey during which he and his people left their reservation in the hopes of escaping to Canada, where the Nez Percé intended to join Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapa Sioux band. The real Chief Joseph was a gifted speaker and more diplomat than war leader.

From the "Trail of Tears" to Wounded Knee and Little Bighorn, the narrative of American history is incomplete without the inclusion of the Native Americans that lived on the continent before European settlers arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the first contact between natives and settlers, tribes like the Sioux, Cherokee, and Navajo have both fascinated and perplexed outsiders with their history, language, and culture.

Kushtaka or Kooshdakhaa is a Tlingit word meaning “land otter man.” The Kushtaka is on one hand the nemeses of the Tlingit people, yet necessary to their Shamans who play a critical role in the survival of the Tlingits. The Tlingit people are as mysterious in their beliefs as the Kushtaka, making for strange bedfellows.

An epic struggle over land, water, and power is erupting in the American West and the halls of Washington, DC. It began when a 4,000-square-mile area of Arizona desert called Black Mesa was divided between the Hopi and Navajo tribes. To the outside world, it was a land struggle between two fractious Indian tribes; to political insiders and energy corporations, it was a divide-and-conquer play for the 21 billion tons of coal beneath Black Mesa. Today, that coal powers cheap electricity for Los Angeles, a new water aqueduct into Phoenix, and the neon dazzle of Las Vegas.

What is truth in the eyes of Native Americans? What does it mean to be Indian? Do American Indians have a sense of humor? How does their religion differ from other spiritualities? Listen to what Tecumseh, Red Jacket and other chiefs have to say, as well as contemporary elders like Two White Feathers and Donald Panther-Yates. Enjoy the humor of American Indian Movement leaders like Russell Means and Dennis Banks in this miscellany published on the anniversary of a groundbreaking website from the 90s. You will never think of American Indian writers and activists the same way.

Winsor Glanvil pays court to Louise Carney, heiress to a fortune, and she agrees to marry him. The marriage is opposed by big Jack Rutledge, a jealous rival and formidable foe, so Glanvil and Louise plan to be married in a sequestered valley by a local clergyman. Rutledge and his supporters, learning of the plan, arrive in the valley ahead of the two and seize Glanvil. Glanvil is beaten mercilessly and Rutledge disfigures him, destroying one side of his face with the cutting edge of a spur. Rutledge then rejoins his gang in the clergyman’s house.

From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes' removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory. The tribes marginalized free black people in the Indian nations well after the Civil War and slavery had ended. In this groundbreaking study, Barbara Krauthamer rewrites the history of southern slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native American slaveholders and the black people they enslaved.

In 1877, the US Government opened the Nez Perce lands in Oregon to settlers and ordered the tribe to move to a reservation in Idaho Territory. Although reluctant to leave their homeland, the Nez Perce began the long trek eastward. A small band of young warriors vented their frustration, however, in two days of deadly attacks on settlements along the Salmon River. Realizing that the US response would be overwhelming—particularly in light of Custer's defeat the year before—the Nez Perce leaders, including Chiefs Joseph, Looking Glass, and White Bird, prepared their people for war.

On March 8, 1782, a group of Western settlers killed nearly 100 unarmed and peaceful Indians who had converted to Christianity under the tutelage of missionaries from the Church of the United Brethren. The murders were cold-blooded and heartless; roughly two-thirds of those executed were women and children. Since that maelstrom of violence struck the small Indian village of Gnadenhutten, history has treated the episode as a simple morality tale.

Here within is a collection of 57 accounts of firsthand narratives of people captured by Indians in colonial times who lived to tell their story of the lives, customs, kindness, and cruelties of Native Americans. Indian raids on small farming communities were bloody and gruesome events, with young and old stripped, clubbed, and scalped. While many were treated harshly by the Indians, some were treated with much kindness by their captors. They were only able to endure these torments through their unwavering belief that God would see them through their terrible ordeal.

Popular narratives of American history conceal as much as they reveal. They present a national identity based on harvesting the treasures that lay in wait for European colonization. In Whose Ruins tells another story: Winding through the US landscape, from Native American earthworks in West Virginia to the Manhattan Project in New Mexico, this history is a tour of sites that were mined for an empire’s power. Showing the hidden costs of ruthless economic growth, particularly to Indigenous people, this book illuminates the myth-making intimately tied to place.

Long before the indigenous people of southeastern North America first encountered Europeans and Africans, they established communities with clear social and political hierarchies and rich cultural traditions. Award-winning historian Gregory D. Smithers brings this world to life in Native Southerners, a sweeping narrative of American Indian history in the Southeast from the time before European colonialism to the Trail of Tears and beyond.

After covering racial unrest in the remote northwest corner of his home state of Nebraska in 1999, journalist Stew Magnuson returned four years later to consider the larger questions of its peoples, their paths, and the forces that separate them. Examining Raymond Yellow Thunder’s death at the hands of four White men in 1972, Magnuson looks deep into the past that gave rise to the tragedy. Situating long-ranging repercussions within 130 years of context, he also recounts the largely forgotten struggles of American Indian Movement activist Bob Yellow Bird.

The region known as Apacheria had been fought over for centuries, firstly with the arrival of the Apache from the north, then later with the arrival of the Spanish, and, finally, the United States. Events came to a bloody climax in the 1800s in a series of conflicts, which became known as the Apache Wars.

In Cherokee myth - as in other indigenous American traditions - the whole of creation is alive and able to communicate like humans and with the human beings who share their environment. Cherokee myths explain how the world came to be the way it is and imparts important lessons about Cherokee cultural values.

Charles Alexander Eastman (1858 -1939), also known as “Ohiyesa”, was an author, physician, and lecturer of Santee Sioux and Anglo-American heritage. As a passionate advocate for the rights of American Indians, he took an active role in national politics. Indian Boyhood is a memoir that chronicles the first 15 years of his life with fascinating portrayals of Sioux culture, including training as a hunter and warrior, religious beliefs and practices, and the role of the medicine man.