But their dreams are abruptly shattered by a brutal Indian raid upon the Johnsons' settlement while Britt is away establishing a business. Returning to find his friends and neighbors slain or captured, his eldest son dead, his beloved and severely damaged Mary enslaved, and his remaining children absorbed into an alien society that will never relinquish its hold on them, the heartsick freedman vows not to rest until his family is whole again. A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post-Civil War years in North Texas, Paulette Jiles's The Color of Lightning is at once an intimate look into the hearts and hopes of tragically flawed human beings and a courageous reexamination of a dark American history.

    As acclaimed historian Heather Cox Richardson shows in Wounded Knee, the massacre grew out of a set of political forces all too familiar to us today: fierce partisanship, heated political rhetoric, and an irresponsible, profit-driven media.Richardson tells a dramatically new story about the Wounded Knee massacre, revealing that its origins lay not in the West but in the corridors of political power back East. Politicians in Washington, Democrat and Republican alike, sought to set the stage for mass murder by exploiting an age-old political tool—fear.Assiduously researched and beautifully written, Wounded Knee will be the definitive account of an epochal American tragedy.

    It was, as Elliott West shows, a tale of courage and ingenuity, of desperate struggle and shattered hope, of short-sighted government action and a doomed flight to freedom. To tell the story, West begins with the early history of the Nez Perce and their years of friendly relations with white settlers. In an initial treaty, the Nez Perce were promised a large part of their ancestral homeland, but the discovery of gold led to a stampede of settlement within the Nez Perce land. Numerous injustices at the hands of the US government combined with the settlers' invasion to provoke this most accommodating of tribes to war. West offers a riveting account of what came next: the harrowing flight of 800 Nez Perce, including many women, children and elderly, across 1500 miles of mountainous and difficult terrain. He gives a full reckoning of the campaigns and battles--and the unexpected turns, brilliant stratagems, and grand heroism that occurred along the way. And he brings to life the complex characters from both sides of the conflict, including cavalrymen, officers, politicians, and--at the center of it all--the Nez Perce themselves (the Nimiipuu, "true people").

    In many ways the oral history differs from what has become the standard and widely accepted biography of Sitting Bull. LaPointe explains the discrepancies, how they occurred, and why he wants to tell his story of Tatanka Iyotake.Ernie LaPointe, a great-grandson of Sitting Bull, was born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He is a Sundancer and lives the traditional way of the Lakota and follows the rules of the sacred pipe. He lives in South Dakota.

    Fiction. Native American Studies. In this first full collection in nine years, Alexie's poems and prose show his celebrated passion and wit while also exploring new directions. Novelist, storyteller and performer, he won the National Book Award for his YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. His work has been praised throughout the world, but the bedrock remains what The New York Times Book Review said of his very first book: "Mr. Alexie's is one of the major lyric voices of our time."

    This book presents an account of the American Indian experience as seen through the eyes of the author.

    StepneyLayout and Book Production by Ally RobertsoneBook ISBN: 978-1-926704-31-9Print ISBN: 978-1-926704-30-1Summary:When Belinda arrives fresh from England, at her father’s store on the edge of a Navajo reservation, she is faced with not only the news her father is ill in hospital, but the store is being run by Jez Lansdowne, a man she hates and distrusts. Until she can find out why Jez is suddenly her father’s new partner, Belinda is forced to live in Chief Yuma’s storage hut, next to the store.Yuma is annoyed the fiery English woman is living on his land, as the Res is soon closing to outsiders. They clash, but a deeper emotion grows into a love that makes Yuma question his culture and traditions.Excerpt:Belinda ran full pelt towards the sound of the waterfall. Just when she thought she was almost there, her feet left the ground and she screamed in angry frustration. Muscular arms encased her like tight bands of steel, and she clawed at them knowing in her heart that this man was way too strong for her to escape from.“Let me go,” she screamed, scratching and kicking with every bit of strength she possessed. “Get off me.” It took a few moments for her to register the soft, masculine voice in her ear. “Belinda, it’s all right. You’re safe now—with friends. No-one’s going to hurt you.”Belinda continued to struggle. Friends! She didn’t have any of them in this godforsaken country. A small sob pushed through her swollen lips, as her strength began to wane. “Belinda, stop. The fight is over. I promise you that while there is breath in my body, no one will hurt you like this again. You’re safe with me.”As the words penetrated her terror fuelled brain, Belinda slowly ceased her wild struggle. She didn’t know who held her, but for the first time since she was a child, she felt totally safe. Still locked inside the protective circle of the arms holding her, she slowly turned. A sob caught in her throat when she saw a single turquoise stone hanging on a silver chain. It was lying on a bare, golden chest, one she remembered very well.

    In telling his story, Littlemoon describes the impact federal Indian policies have had on his life and on the history of his family. He gives a rare view into the cruelty inflicted on generations of Native American children through the implementation of U.S. government boarding schools, which resulted in a muted truth, called Soul Wound by some. In addition, and for the first time, his narrative provides a resident's view of the 1973 militant Occupation of Wounded Knee and the lasting impact that takeover has had on his community. His path toward a sense of peace and contentment is one he hopes others will follow. Remembering and telling the truth about traumatic events are prerequisites for healing. Many books have been written by scholars describing one aspect or another of Native American life, their history, their spirituality, the 1973 occupation, and a few have tried to describe the boarding schools. None have connected the dots. Until the language of the everyday man is used, scholarly words will shut out the people they describe and the pathology created by federal Indian policy will continue.

    The editors of this volume, Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, argue that such a period and region of instability and regrouping constituted a “shatter zone.” In this anthology, archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists analyze the shatter zone created in the colonial South by examining the interactions of American Indians and European colonists. The forces that destabilized the region included especially the frenzied commercial traffic in Indian slaves conducted by both Europeans and Indians, which decimated several southern Native communities; the inherently fluid political and social organization of precontact Mississippian chiefdoms; and the widespread epidemics that spread across the South. Using examples from a range of Indian communities—Muskogee, Catawba, Iroquois, Alabama, Coushatta, Shawnee, Choctaw, Westo, and Natchez—the contributors assess the shatter zone region as a whole, and the varied ways in which Native peoples wrestled with an increasingly unstable world and worked to reestablish order.

    G. Jung visited the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, where he spent several hours with Ochwiay Biano, Mountain Lake, an elder at the Pueblo. This encounter impacted Jung psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually, and had a sustained influence on his theories and understanding of the psyche. Dakota Sioux intellectual and political leader, Vine Deloria Jr., began a close study of the writings of C. G. Jung over two decades ago, but had long been struck by certain affinities and disjunctures between Jungian and Sioux Indian thought. He also noticed that many Jungians were often drawn to Native American traditions. This book, the result of Deloria’s investigation of these affinities, is written as a measured comparison between the psychology of C. G. Jung and the philosophical and cultural traditions of the Sioux people. Deloria constructs a fascinating dialogue between the two systems that touches on cosmology, the family, relations with animals, visions, voices, and individuation.

    But she never guesses that the rough-and tumble Jack Dillon is the red wolf she's often seen in her dreams and a man destined to change her own life.

    It speaks about the American Indian Boarding School Era, which is a cause of the alcohol, drugs and other wellness problems faced by Native communities throughout North America. It utilizes a culturally appropriate understanding of the 12 Steps process for individual sobriety, recovery and healing.

    The author of Indian Boyhood was raised in the traditional way after the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War. His father later persuaded him to study Christianity and attend medical school. But when Eastman served as a government doctor during the Wounded Knee massacre, he became disillusioned about Americans' capacity to live up to their own ideals. While Eastman's contemporaries viewed him as "a great American and a true philosopher," Indian scholars have long dismissed Eastman's work as assimilationist. Now, for the first time, his philosophy as manifested in his writing is examined in detail. David Martinez explores Eastman's views on the U.S.-Dakota War, Dakota and Ojibwe relations, Dakota sacred history, and citizenship in the Progressive Era, claiming for him a long overdue place in America's intellectual pantheon.

    The Constitution formalized the relationship between Indian tribes and the United States government--a relationship forged through a long history of war and land usurpation--within a federal structure not mirrored in the traditions of tribal governance. Although the Constitution recognized the sovereignty of Indian nations, it did not safeguard tribes against the tides of national expansion and exploitationAs Broken Landscape demonstrates, the federal government has repeatedly failed to respect the Constitution's recognition of tribal sovereignty. Instead, it has favored excessive, unaccountable authority in its dealings with tribes. The Supreme Court has strayed from its Constitutional roots as well, consistently issuing decisions over two centuries that have bolstered federal power over the tribes.Frank Pommersheim, one of America's leading scholars in Indian tribal law, offers a novel and deeply researched synthesis of this legal history from colonial times to the present, confronting the failures of constitutional analysis in contemporary Indian law jurisprudence. Closing with a proposal for a Constitutional amendment that would reaffirm tribal sovereignty, Pommersheim challenges us to finally accord Indian tribes and Indian people the respect and dignity that are their due.

    In the follow-up to his multi-award-winning debut novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie weaves another deeply insightful story for teens that blends heartrending emotion and frank, honest humor.

    Although among the best known of eighteen annual ceremonies, Ochpaniztli’s significance has nevertheless been poorly understood. Ochpaniztli is known mainly from early colonial illustrated manuscripts produced in cross-cultural collaboration between Spanish missionary-chroniclers and native Mexican informants and artists.Although scholars typically privilege the manuscripts’ textual descriptions, Sweeping the Way examines the fundamental role of their pictorial elements, which significantly expand the information contained in the texts. DiCesare emphasizes the primacy of the regalia, ritual implements, and adornments of the patron “goddess” as the point of intersection between sacred, cosmic forces and ceremonial celebrants. The associations of these paraphernalia indicate that Ochpaniztli was a period of purification rituals, designed to transform and protect individual and communal bodies alike. Spanish friars were unable to apprehend the complex nature of the festival’s patroness, ultimately fragmenting her identity into categories meeting their expectations, which continues to vex modern investigations.Taken together, the variety of Ochpaniztli sources offer a useful tool for addressing myriad issues of translation and transformation in pre-Columbian and post-conquest Mexico, as Christian friars and native Mexicans together negotiated a complex body of information about outlawed ritual practices and proscribed sacred entities.