Although more than 400 Navajos served in the military during World War II as top-secret code talkers, even those fighting shoulder to shoulder with them were not told of their covert function. And, after the war, the Navajos were forbidden to speak of their service until 1968, when the code was finally declassified. Of the original twenty- nine Navajo code talkers, only two are still alive. Chester Nez is one of them.In this memoir, the eighty-nine-year-old Nez chronicles both his war years and his life growing up on the Checkerboard Area of the Navajo Reservation-the hard life that gave him the strength, both physical and mental, to become a Marine. His story puts a living face on the legendary men who developed what is still the only unbroken code in modern warfare.

    

    They don t ride horses or get falling down drunk. They are not the stoic crying Indian from a commercial nor the flowing-haired warrior on the cover of a romance novel. The characters in these 18 stories and poems are regular Indians - people who have day jobs, college students, insecure folks, kids in love. These characters are unique, diverse, and just like the rest of America. The book is heartbreaking and life-affirming, controversial and heartwarming, funny and tragic. If you think you know about Indians or if you know that you don't, step into the lives of these characters and you will come away enlightened, discomfited, entertained and inspired.

    Navajos Wear Nikes reveals the complexity of modern life on the Navajo Reservation, a world where Anglo and Navajo coexisted in a tenuous truce. After the births of his Navajo half-siblings, Jim and his family moved off the Reservation to an Arizona border town where they struggled to readapt to an Anglo world that no longer felt like home.With tales of gangs and skinwalkers, an Indian Boy Scout troop, a fanatical Sunday school teacher, and the author's own experience of sincere friendships that lead to ho?zho? (beautiful harmony), Kristofic's memoir is an honest portrait of growing up on--and growing to love--the Reservation.

    With the growing estrangement from his family, he is shaken by the increasingly powerful feeling that he is different. The day he meets Jason Bedford in an Albuquerque park, the Indian youth's unexplained yearnings blaze into outright desire. Jason, a successful Anglo artist, likewise exposes him to a different, heretofore unimagined, economic lifestyle. When his whittling turns into art, Wilam begins to hope this will provide a way of escape from the trap his life has become.Born into a Native American culture without a tradition of respect for Two-Spirits, Wilam finally embraces his unusual appetites and struggles to chart an uncertain course through the homophobic society surrounding him. His growing skill as a sculptor helps him find his way. His search for a soul mate proves more difficult.From the author of Cut Hand, The Victor & The Vanquished introduces us to a world few witness with characters many can relate. Mark Wildyr has delivered a great story once again.

    The family relationships between those who “sat for the photographer” are clearly visible in these images—sisters, friends, families, young couples—who appear and reappear to fill in a chronicle spanning from 1879 to 1942. Also included are candid shots of Ho-Chunk on the streets of Black River Falls, outside family dwellings, and at powwows. As author and Ho-Chunk tribal member Amy Lonetree writes, “A significant number of the images were taken just a few short years after the darkest, most devastating period for the Ho-Chunk. Invasion, diseases, warfare, forced assimilation, loss of land, and repeated forced removals from our beloved homelands left the Ho-Chunk people in a fight for their culture and their lives.”The book includes three introductory essays (a biographical essay by Matthew Daniel Mason, a critical essay by Amy Lonetree, and a reflection by Tom Jones) and 300-plus duotone photographs and captions in gallery style. Unique to the project are the identifications in the captions, which were researched over many years with the help of tribal members and genealogists, and include both English and Ho-Chunk names.

    Abandoned soon after her illegitimate birth by her mother, sixteen-year-old Jessie Thornton, Tia finds more than she bargained for in her search for her father. While staying with her grandmother at the Thornton ranch, she comes across a drawing of a young Indian couple drawn many years ago. To her horror she finds herself staring into the smiling face of a man who has haunted her dreams for as long as she can remember. The beautiful young girl standing by his side is Tia's double.

    Native American Studies. Latino/Latina Studies. Philosophy. In INDIGENOUS QUOTIENT/STALKING WORDS, G�mez-Qui�ones argues for readers to connect to the intellectual traditions of an ever-present American Indigenous civilization. With this new consciousness of lndigeneity, readers can better understand the intellectual and cultural heritage of all peoples in the Western hemisphere as a continuation of millennia of history and civilization. As such, G�mez-Qui�ones demonstrates that Indigenous history is U.S. and Western hemisphere history and vice versa. A critical understanding of this is a necessary requirement for any useful understanding of the history of culture, politics, and economics in the Western hemisphere. Finally, G�mez-Qui�ones's essays demonstrate the necessity of the fundamental Indigenous belief in the interdependence of all life and life sources. This depicts the historic and present responsibility all humans have to each other and their environment.

    Featuring the works of more than 80 authors and artists. The contributors' narratives and art address themes of the land, the lakes, family, the search for center, ideas of time and the past, communalism and our Native communities on and off reservation homelands, along with storytelling, Indian education, the Michigan urban Indian experience, ceremony and ritual, persistence of traditional arts and lifeways, and new cultural ways of being. An insightful, enjoyable and important collection for all ages. Also recommended for classroom use. The book is a 300-page paperback with flaps and includes 24 full-color pages of artwork and photography.

    But as Cherokee chief in the mid-nineteenth century, he would guide the tribe through its most turbulent period. The Cherokees' plight lay at the epicenter of nearly all the key issues facing a young America: western expansion, states' rights, judicial power, and racial discrimination. Clashes between Ross and President Andrew Jackson raged from battlefields to the White House and Supreme Court. As whites settled illegally on the Nation's land, the chief steadfastly refused to sign a removal treaty. Only when a group of renegade Cherokees betrayed their chief and negotiated an agreement with Jackson's men was he forced to begin his journey west. In one of America's great tragedies, thousands died during the Cherokees' migration on the Trail of Tears.Toward the Setting Sun retells the story of expansionism from the native perspective, and takes a critical look at the well-rehearsed story of American progress.

    Traditionally known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, these artifacts of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood were the subject of the groundbreaking 2007 book Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, which presented a major reconstruction of the rituals, cosmology, ideology, and political structures of the Mississippian peoples.Visualizing the Sacred advances the study of Mississippian iconography by delving into the regional variations within what is now known as the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS). Bringing archaeological, ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and iconographic perspectives to the analysis of Mississippian art, contributors from several disciplines discuss variations in symbols and motifs among major sites and regions across a wide span of time and also consider what visual symbols reveal about elite status in diverse political environments. These findings represent the first formal identification of style regions within the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere and call for a new understanding of the MIIS as a network of localized, yet interrelated religious systems that experienced both continuity and change over time.

    In states west of the Appalachian Mountains, the operation of steamboats quickly grew into a booming business that would lead to new cultural practices and a stronger sectional identity.In Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom, Robert Gudmestad examines the wide-ranging influence of steamboats on the southern economy. From carrying cash crops to market to contributing to slave productivity, increasing the flexibility of labor, and connecting southerners to overlapping orbits of regional, national, and international markets, steamboats not only benefited slaveholders and northern industries but also affected cotton production.This technology literally put people into motion, and travelers developed an array of unique cultural practices, from gambling to boat races. Gudmestad also asserts that the intersection of these riverboats and the environment reveals much about sectional identity in antebellum America. As federal funds backed railroad construction instead of efforts to clear waterways for steamboats, southerners looked to coordinate their own economic development, free of national interests.Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom offers new insights into the remarkable and significant history of transportation and commerce in the prewar South.

    It follows his life's journey from a youth through his years as a warrior, to great War Chief, to elder on the council. Young Gull led his people south after the Iroquois War to establish them at Aamjiwnaang at the foot of Lake Huron."

    Utley, author of Cavalier in Buckskin "Jeff Barnes has really done his research. . . . Highly recommended." --James Donovan, author of A Terrible Glory Guide to forts, military posts, battlefields, and other sites that interpret George Armstrong Custer's decade of operations on the Great Plains Locations in Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana Extended section on Little Bighorn Each entry includes directions, amenities, contact information, and recommended reading

    One of the oldest reservations in the United States—the Poospatuck Reservation—is located in Suffolk County, the densely populated eastern extreme of the greater New York area. The Unkechaug Indians, known also by the name of their reservation, are recognized by the State of New York but not by the federal government. This narrative account—written by a noted authority on the Algonquin peoples of Long Island—is the first comprehensive history of the Unkechaug Indians. Drawing on archaeological and documentary sources, John A. Strong traces the story of the Unkechaugs from their ancestral past, predating the arrival of Europeans, to the present day. He describes their first encounters with British settlers, who introduced to New England’s indigenous peoples guns, blankets, cloth, metal tools, kettles, as well as disease and alcohol. Although granted a large reservation in perpetuity, the Unkechaugs were, like many Indian tribes, the victims of broken promises, and their landholdings diminished from several thousand acres to fifty-five. Despite their losses, the Unkechaugs have persisted in maintaining their cultural traditions and autonomy by taking measures to boost their economy, preserve their language, strengthen their  communal bonds, and defend themselves against legal challenges. In early histories of Long Island, the Unkechaugs figured only as a colorful backdrop to celebratory stories of British settlement. Strong’s account, which includes extensive testimony from tribal members themselves, brings the Unkechaugs out of the shadows of history and establishes a permanent record of their struggle to survive as a distinct community.

    Focusing on the Sioux nation as representative of the entire Native American story, this meticulously researched account allows the great chiefs and warriors to speak for themselves about what happened to the Sioux from 1860 to the Massacre of Wounded Knee in 1891. This dramatic story is essential reading for every student of U.S. history.

    Ancient Earth and the First Ancestors not only tells afascinating story that spans billions of years, but is also a wonderful chronicle of two people from different cultural and scientific heritages learning to understand, appreciate,and see the value and importance in each other’s way of viewing this land and the planet we all call home.

     While the romanticized story of the Jamestown colony has been retold many times, the events following the marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe are less well known. The peace and goodwill did not last; within one hundred years of the English settlers’ arrival in Virginia, the Indian population had been reduced by more than 90 percent through warfare, disease, and indiscriminate extermination.  Britain’s first successful settlements in America occurred more than four hundred years ago. Not surprisingly, the historical accounts of these events have often contained inaccuracies. This compelling study of colonial Virginia, based on the latest research, sheds new light on the tensions between the English and the American Indians and clarifies the facts about several storied relationships. In Lethal Encounters, Alfred A. Cave examines why the Anglo settlers were unable to establish a peaceful and productive relationship with the region’s native inhabitants and explains how the deep prejudices harbored by both whites and Indians, the incompatibility of their economic and social systems, and the leadership failures of protagonists such as John Smith, Powhatan, Opechancanough, and William Berkeley contributed to this breakdown.

    This innovative children's picture book creatively adapts the traditional English Christmas carol to describe and illustrate the unique material cultures and traditions of twelve Native American tribes within the United States.--Amazon.com.