There, only forty miles from the Canadian border and freedom, Chief Joseph, convinced that the wounded and elders could go no farther, walked across the snowy battlefield, handed his rifle to the U.S. military commander who had been pursuing them, and spoke his now-famous words, "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."The story has been told many times, but never before in its entirety or with such narrative richness. Drawing on four years of research, interviews, and 20,000 miles of travel, Nerburn takes us beyond the surrender to the captives' unlikely welcome in Bismarck, North Dakota, their tragic eight-year exile in Indian Territory, and their ultimate return to the Northwest. Nerburn reveals the true, complex character of Joseph, showing how the man was transformed into a myth by a public hungry for an image of the noble Indian and how Joseph exploited the myth in order to achieve his single goal of returning his people to their homeland.Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce is far more than the story of a man and a people. It is a grand saga of a pivotal time in our nation's history. Its pages are alive with the presence of Lewis and Clark, General William Tecumseh Sherman, General George Armstrong Custer, and Sitting Bull. Its events brush against the California Gold Rush, the Civil War, the great western pioneer migration, and the building of the telegraph and the transcontinental railroad. Once you have read this groundbreaking work, you will never look at Chief Joseph, the American Indian, or our nation's westward journey in the same way again.

    Curtis' stunning, evocative and hugely popular portraits of Native American Women--with never-before-published images.

    It is the story of Shoe Boots, a famed Cherokee warrior and successful farmer, and Doll, an African slave he acquired in the late 1790s. Over the next thirty years, Shoe Boots and Doll lived together as master and slave and also as lifelong partners who, with their children and grandchildren, experienced key events in American history—including slavery, the Creek War, the founding of the Cherokee Nation and subsequent removal of Native Americans along the Trail of Tears, and the Civil War. This is the gripping story of their lives, in slavery and in freedom.Meticulously crafted from historical and literary sources, Ties That Bind vividly portrays the members of the Shoeboots family. Doll emerges as an especially poignant character, whose life is mostly known through the records of things done to her—her purchase, her marriage, the loss of her children—but also through her moving petition to the federal government for the pension owed to her as Shoe Boots's widow. A sensitive rendition of the hard realities of black slavery within Native American nations, the book provides the fullest picture we have of the myriad complexities, ironies, and tensions among African Americans, Native Americans, and whites in the first half of the nineteenth century.

    Indians retained control over most of the lands in Spain’s American empire. Mounted on horseback, savvy about European ways, and often possessing firearms, independent Indians continued to find new ways to resist subjugation by Spanish soldiers and conversion by Spanish missionaries.In this panoramic study, David J. Weber explains how late eighteenthcentury Spanish administrators tried to fashion a more enlightened policy toward the people they called bárbaros, or “savages.” Even Spain’s most powerful monarchs failed, however, to enforce a consistent, well-reasoned policy toward Indians. At one extreme, powerful independent Indians forced Spaniards to seek peace, acknowledge autonomous tribal governments, and recognize the existence of tribal lands, fulfilling the Crown’s oft-stated wish to use “gentle” means in dealing with Indians. At the other extreme the Crown abandoned its principles, authorizing bloody wars on Indians when Spanish officers believed they could defeat them. Power, says Weber, more than the power of ideas, determined how Spaniards treated “savages” in the Age of Enlightenment.

    At the heart of the decision for Johnson v. M'Intosh was a discovery doctrine that gave rights of ownership to the European sovereigns who discovered the land and converted the indigenous owners into tenants. Though its meaning and intention has been fiercely disputed, more than 175 years later, this doctrine remains the law of the land. In 1991, while investigating the discovery doctrine's historical origins Lindsay Robertson made a startling find; in the basement of a Pennsylvania furniture-maker, he discovered a trunk with the complete corporate records of the Illinois and Wabash Land Companies, the plaintiffs in Johnson v. M'Intosh. Conquest by Law provides, for the first time, the complete and troubling account of the European discovery of the Americas. This is a gripping tale of political collusion, detailing how a spurious claim gave rise to a doctrine--intended to be of limited application--which itself gave rise to a massive displacement of persons and the creation of a law that governs indigenous people and their lands to this day.

    They recognized as authentic only those expressions of “Indianness” that conformed to their limited definitions and reflected their sense of colonial legitimacy and racial superiority. Raibmon shows that Whites and Aboriginals were collaborators—albeit unequal ones—in the politics of authenticity. Non-Aboriginal people employed definitions of Indian culture that limited Aboriginal claims to resources, land, and sovereignty, while Aboriginals utilized those same definitions to access the social, political, and economic means necessary for their survival under colonialism.Drawing on research in newspapers, magazines, agency and missionary records, memoirs, and diaries, Raibmon combines cultural and labor history. She looks at three historical episodes: the participation of a group of Kwakwaka’wakw from Vancouver in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago; the work of migrant Aboriginal laborers in the hop fields of Puget Sound; and the legal efforts of Tlingit artist Rudolph Walton to have his mixed-race step-children admitted to the white public school in Sitka, Alaska. Together these episodes reveal the consequences of outsiders’ attempts to define authentic Aboriginal culture. Raibmon argues that Aboriginal culture is much more than the reproduction of rituals; it also lies in the means by which Aboriginal people generate new and meaningful ways of identifying their place in a changing modern environment.

    Early writers did not speak the native language and hence could not interview in the native tongue nor did they seek any concepts or knowledge of the Sioux spirituality. Too many of these writers have errantly attempted to create a rivalry and animosity between the tow and hence downgraded and diluted the magnificent Sioux culture, its rich history and great leaders such a culture could produce.

    Few Britons noticed the gang's mistaken muddling of North American and Indian subcontinent geographies and cultures. Even fewer cared in an age in which "Indian" was a catch-all term applied to theatre characters, philosophies, and objects whose only common characteristic often was that they were not European. Yet just thirty years later, when the North American empire had entered center stage, Londoners bought Iroquois tomahawks at auctions; provincial newspapers debated Cherokee politics; women shopkeepers read aloud newspaper accounts of frontier battles as their husbands counted the takings; church congregations listened to the sermons of American Indian converts; families toured museum exhibits of American Indian artefacts; and Oxford dons wagered their bottles of port on the outcome of American wars. Focusing on the question, 'How did the British who remained in Britain perceive American Indians, and how did these perceptions reflect and affect British culture?', Savages within the Empire explores both how Britons engaged with the peripheries of their Atlantic empire without leaving home, and, equally important, how their forged understanding significantly affected the British and their rapidly expanding world.It draws from a wide range of evidence to consider an array of eighteenth-century contexts, including material culture, print culture, imperial government policy, the Church of England's missionary endeavours, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the public outcry over the use ofAmerican Indians as allies during the American War of Independence. By chronicling and exploring discussions and representations of American Indians in these contexts, Troy Bickham reveals the proliferation of empire-related subjects in eighteenth-century British culture as well as the prevailing pragmatism with which Britons approached them. "An excellent example of the new imperial history. Savages within the Empire admirably blends concern with the nature of colonialism and the importance of human agency with respect for the unpredictable unfolding of histories rooted in the specificity of particular places in particular times."--Andrew Cayton, The International History Review"An excellent example of the new imperial history. omantic Indians admirably blends concern with the nature of colonialism and the importance of human agency with respect for the unpredictable unfolding of histories rooted in the specificity of particular places in particular times."--Andrew Cayton, The International History Review

    But what of the people who already inhabited these lands? The federal government promised to care for the Indians in perpetuity and in return, the nomadic Indians would sign treaties, settle on reserves, and learn to be farmers. Many Indians, including those led by Chief Cowessess, camped and hunted in the Cypress Hills where there was plenty of game, water, and wood. Forced out of the Hills by the government and driven by hunger to a reserve in the Qu'Appelle Valley, Cowessess and his people were successful farmers, but they had little control over what was supposed to be their land.The story of life on reserves after treaty is a story of power: the power of Indian Affairs. Indian agents controlled every aspect of life on and off reserve - the dreaded pass system and permission slips needed to sell farm produce, or not as it suited the agents; the instructors whose job it was to transform Indian hunters into farmers; the residential school system, and the questionable surrender of reserve land. Yet, this book does not make a political statement. It does not judge the actions of the government, its agents, or anyone else. In an ever-respectful voice, this book relates things as they were, and points to the many successes of Indian peoples despite the many challenges they faced.This book is a story of triumph over adversity and oppression. In this very personal account of life on an Indian reserve and in residential schools, Harold LeRat, with the assistance of writer Linda Ungar, relates the history of the Cowessess people based on stories told by elders, research he did in connection with the land surrender, and his own recollections. In many ways, this book provides a look at the Indian reality of the lives of many First Nations peoples and the development of reserves on the Prairies. Anyone interested in the history of the west will treasure this book.

    This dramatic transformation has been understood in two very different ways - as a series of consensual transactions, but also as a process of violent conquest. Both views cannot be correct. How did Indians actually lose their land? Stuart Banner provides the first comprehensive answer. He argues that neither simple coercion nor simple consent reflects the complicated legal history of land transfers. Instead, time, place, and the balance of power between Indians and settlers decided the outcome of land struggles. As whites' power grew, they were able to establish the legal institutions and the rules by which land transactions would be made and enforced. This story of America's colonisation remains a story of power, but a more complex kind of power than historians have acknowledged. It is a story in which military force was less important than the power to shape the legal framework within which land would be owned. could believe they were buying land from the Indians the same way they bought land from one another. How the Indians Lost Their Land dramatically reveals how subtle changes in the law can determine the fate of a nation, and our understanding of the past.

    When the smoke cleared, Colonel John M. Chivington's troops returned to Denver, waving Indian scalps and body parts to an adoring crowd that hailed the conquering heroes as saviors of the territory. Chivington claimed his militia decimated the entire Cheyenne and Arapaho nations - some five to six hundred warriors among them, including the fearsome Cheyenne Dog Soldiers. His actions prompted the Rocky Mountain News to hoist Chivington among the greatest American military leaders of the time, an endorsement that would surely catapult the former Methodist preacher to lofty political office. But the Dog Soldiers were still alive. In fact, none of the warriors guilty of the violent depredations on the Plains were anywhere near Sand Creek when the civilian militia attacked. Union soldiers accused Chivington of conducting a wholesale massacre of Indian prisoners camped under the protection of the army, claiming the majority of the 160 killed were women, children and elderly. Within months, Chivington's renowned "Battle of Sand Creek" descended into a broiling kettle of accusation and recrimination, turning soldier against soldier, and Indian against Indian. Sand Creek dramatically reassembles the labyrinth of power, politics and controversy that ignited the most notorious event in the history of the American West. Kevin Cahill's spellbinding narrative examines the massacre at Sand Creek, from its early roots in the Civil War, to the subsequent government investigations that entangled both soldiers and Indians in a web of political deceit and murder. Cahill's insightful resurrection of the true-life Indians, soldiers and settlers provides a poignant perspective on the monument

    The first history of the Cherokees to appear in over four decades, this is also the first to be endorsed by the tribe and the first to be written by a Cherokee. Robert Conley begins his survey with Cherokee origin myths and legends. He then explores their relations with neighboring Indian groups and European missionaries and settlers. He traces their forced migrations west, relates their participations on both sides of the Civil War and the wars of the twentieth century, and concludes with an examination of Cherokee life today. Conley provides analyses for general readers of all ages to learn the significance of tribal lore and Cherokee tribal law. Following the history is a listing of the Principal Chiefs of the Cherokees with a brief biography of each and separate listings of the chiefs of the Eastern Cherokees and the Western Cherokees. For those who want to know more about Cherokee heritage and history, Conley offers additional reading lists at the end of each chapter.