Best of
Native-American-History

2001

Power and Place: Indian Education in America


Vine Deloria Jr. - 2001
    This collection of sixteen essays is at once philosophic, practical, and visionary. It is an effort to open discussion about the unique experience of Native Americans and offers a concise reference for administrators, educators, students and community leaders involved with Indian Education.

To Become a Human Being: The Message of Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah


Steve Wall - 2001
    The Native American way of life has kept its people close to their living roots. To Become a Human Being--to rise to an expanded level of consciousness by living on the Earth as it was intended for us to live--captures the essence of Native American wisdom, in the words of Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah, high chief among the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, and revered spiritual leader.Using tapes of conversations made over a thirteen-year period, Wall recreates Chief Shenandoah's message in a unique free-flowing voice. What's more, Wall enhances the message with the dramatic photographs that have made each of his creations, including the bestselling Wisdomkeepers, not just books, but treasures.

Tell Them We Are Going Home: The Odyssey of the Northern Cheyennes


John H. Monnett - 2001
    Incorporating the perspectives of the Cheyennes, the U.S. military, the Indian Bureau, and the Kansas settlers who encountered the traveling Indians, this book provides a complete account of the odyssey. The dramatic fifteen-hundred-mile trek of the Northern Cheyennes through Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Montana, lasting from 1878 to 1879, would become one of the most important episodes in American history and in Cheyenne memory.

A Sacred Path: The Way of the Muscogee Creeks


Jean Haya-Atke Hiyutke Chaudhuri - 2001
    Native American Studies. A SACRED PATH is ultimately about Creek peoplehood. It connects the Muscogee sacred history with the land, the spirit world, the confederacy's sociopolitical organization, and the ceremonial cycle in a carefully researched and well-written single volume. The Chaudhuris' understanding of Creek traditions and their insights into the internal world of traditional Native American values and value systems are unequaled. Jean's work as a researcher and storyteller in her native Muscogee language teamed with Joy's background in philosophy and American Indian studies makes this volume a major contribution to the literature on the Creeks as well as a highly readable and fascinating ethno history--Tom Holm, Ph.D. (Cherokee-Creek).

Landscape Traveled by Coyote and Crane: The World of the Schitsu'umsh


Rodney Frey - 2001
    The result of an intensive collaboration between investigator and Native people, the book includes many traditional stories that invite the reader's participation in the world of the Schitsu'umsh.The Schitsu'umsh landscape of lake and mountains is described with a richness that emphasizes its essential material and spiritual qualities. The historical trauma of the Schitsu'umsh, stemming from their nineteenth-century contacts with Euro-American culture, is given dramatic weight. Nonetheless, examples of adaptation and continuity in traditional cultural expression, rather than destruction and discontinuity, are the most conspicuous features of this vivid ethnographic portrait.Drawing on pivotal oral traditions, Frey mirrors the Schitsu'umsh world view in his organization and presentation of ethnographic material. He uses first-person accounts by his Native consultants to convey crucial cultural perspectives and practices. Because of its unusual methodology, Landscape Traveled by Coyote and Crane is likely to become a model for future work with Native American peoples, within the Plateau region and beyond.

Sarah Winnemucca


Sally Zanjani - 2001
    Born into a legendary family of Paiute leaders in western Nevada, Sarah dedicated much of her life to working for her people. She played an instrumental and controversial role as interpreter and messenger for the U.S. Army during the Bannock War of 1878 and traveled to Washington in 1880 to obtain the release of her people from confinement on the Yakama Reservation. She toured the East Coast in the 1880s, tirelessly giving speeches about the plight of her people and heavily criticizing the reservation system. In 1883 she produced her autobiography—the first written by a Native woman—and founded a Native school whose educational practices were far ahead of its time. Sally Zanjani also reveals Sarah’s notorious sharp tongue and wit, her love of performance, her string of failed relationships, and at the end, possible poisoning by a romantic rival.