The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity


Jill Lepore - 1998
    Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war."It all began when Philip (called Metacom by his own people), the leader of the Wampanoag Indians, led attacks against English towns in the colony of Plymouth. The war spread quickly, pitting a loose confederation of southeastern Algonquians against a coalition of English colonists. While it raged, colonial armies pursued enemy Indians through the swamps and woods of New England, and Indians attacked English farms and towns from Narragansett Bay to the Connecticut River Valley. Both sides, in fact, had pursued the war seemingly without restraint, killing women and children, torturing captives, and mutilating the dead. The fighting ended after Philip was shot, quartered, and beheaded in August 1676.The war's brutality compelled the colonists to defend themselves against accusations that they had become savages. But Jill Lepore makes clear that it was after the war--and because of it--that the boundaries between cultures, hitherto blurred, turned into rigid ones. King Philip's War became one of the most written-about wars in our history, and Lepore argues that the words strengthened and hardened feelings that, in turn, strengthened and hardened the enmity between Indians and Anglos. She shows how, as late as the nineteenth century, memories of the war were instrumental in justifying Indian removals--and how in our own century that same war has inspired Indian attempts to preserve "Indianness" as fiercely as the early settlers once struggled to preserve their Englishness.Telling the story of what may have been the bitterest of American conflicts, and its reverberations over the centuries, Lepore has enabled us to see how the ways in which we remember past events are as important in their effect on our history as were the events themselves.From the Hardcover edition.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus


Charles C. Mann - 2005
    Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.

The Scalpel and the Silver Bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine and Traditional Healing


Lori Arviso Alvord - 1999
    Alvord left a dusty reservation in New Mexico for Stanford University Medical School, becoming the first Navajo woman surgeon. Rising above the odds presented by her own culture and the male-dominated world of surgeons, she returned to the reservation to find a new challenge. In dramatic encounters, Dr. Alvord witnessed the power of belief to influence health, for good or for ill. She came to merge the latest breakthroughs of medical science with the ancient tribal paths to recovery and wellness, following the Navajo philosophy of a balanced and harmonious life, called Walking in Beauty. And now, in bringing these principles to the world of medicine, The Scalpel and the Silver Bear joins those few rare works, such as Healing and the Mind, whose ideas have changed medical practices-and our understanding of the world.

Queer, There and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World


Sarah Prager - 2017
    From high-profile figures like Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt to the trailblazing gender-ambiguous Queen of Sweden and a bisexual blues singer who didn’t make it into your history books, these astonishing true stories uncover a rich queer heritage that encompasses every culture, in every era.

Dear Bully: Seventy Authors Tell Their Stories


Megan Kelley HallDawn Metcalf - 2011
    Stine turned being the "funny guy" into the best defense against the bullies in his class.Today's top authors for teens come together to share their stories about bullying—as silent observers on the sidelines of high school, as victims, and as perpetrators—in a collection at turns moving and self-effacing, but always deeply personal.

Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present


Peter Nabokov - 1978
    Drawing from a wide range of sources - traditional narratives, Indian autobiographies, government transcripts, firsthand interviews, and more - Nabokov has assembled a remarkably rich and vivid collection, representing nothing less than an alternative history of North America. Beginning with the Indian's first encounters with the earliest explorers, traders, missionaries, settlers, and soldiers and continuing to the present, Native American Testimony presents an authentic, challenging picture of an important, tragic, and frequently misunderstood aspect of American history.

Classified: The Secret Career of Mary Golda Ross, Cherokee Aerospace Engineer


Traci Sorell - 2021
    Find out how her passion for math and the Cherokee values she was raised with shaped her life and work. Cherokee author Traci Sorell and Métis illustrator Natasha Donovan trace Ross's journey from being the only girl in a high school math class to becoming a teacher to pursuing an engineering degree, joining the top-secret Skunk Works division of Lockheed, and being a mentor for Native Americans and young women interested in engineering. In addition, the narrative highlights Cherokee values including education, working cooperatively, remaining humble, and helping ensure equal opportunity and education for all.

Wisdomkeepers: Meetings with Native American Spiritual Elders


Steve Wall - 1990
    With magnificent photographs and powerful words, the Wisdomkeepers share their innermost thoughts and feelings, their dreams and visions, their jokes and laughter, their healing remedies and apocalyptic prophecies and -- above all -- their humanity, which shines through every page of Wisdomkeepers. This is their book. They are the Elders, the Old Ones, the fragile repositories of sacred ways and natural wisdom going back millennia -- yet never more relevant than today.

Black Elk: The Sacred Ways of a Lakota


Wallace Black Elk - 1990
    "An unprecedented account of the shaman's world and the way it is entered."Stanley Krippner, PhD, coauthor of Personal Mythology: The Psychology of Your Evolving Self and Healing State.Black Elk opens the Lakota sacred hoop.

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis


Timothy Egan - 2011
    He moved in rarefied circles, a friend to presidents, vaudeville stars, leading thinkers. And he was thirty-two years old in 1900 when he gave it all up to pursue his Great Idea: to capture on film the continent’s original inhabitants before the old ways disappeared.An Indiana Jones with a camera, Curtis spent the next three decades traveling from the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the Acoma on a high mesa in New Mexico to the Salish in the rugged Northwest rain forest, documenting the stories and rituals of more than eighty tribes. It took tremendous perseverance - ten years alone to persuade the Hopi to allow him into their Snake Dance ceremony. And the undertaking changed him profoundly, from detached observer to outraged advocate. Eventually Curtis took more than 40,000 photographs, preserved 10,000 audio recordings, and is credited with making the first narrative documentary film. In the process, the charming rogue with the grade school education created the most definitive archive of the American Indian. His most powerful backer was Theodore Roosevelt, and his patron was J. P. Morgan. Despite the friends in high places, he was always broke and often disparaged as an upstart in pursuit of an impossible dream. He completed his masterwork in 1930, when he published the last of the twenty volumes. A nation in the grips of the Depression ignored it. But today rare Curtis photogravures bring high prices at auction, and he is hailed as a visionary. In the end he fulfilled his promise: He made the Indians live forever.

On the Rez


Ian Frazier - 2000
    Crazy Horse, perhaps the greatest Indian war leader of the 1800s, and Black Elk, the holy man whose teachings achieved worldwide renown, were Oglala; in these typically perceptive pages, Frazier seeks out their descendants on Pine Ridge--a/k/a the rez--which is one of the poorest places in America today.Along with his longtime friend Le War Lance (whom he first wrote about in his 1989 bestseller, Great Plains) and other Oglala companions, Frazier fully explores the rez as they visit friends and relatives, go to pow-wows and rodeos and package stores, and tinker with a variety of falling-apart cars. He takes us inside the world of the Sioux as few writers ever have, writing with much wit, compassion, and imagination. In the career of SuAnne Big Crow, for example, the most admired Oglala basketball player of all time, who died in a car accident in 1992, Frazier finds a contemporary reemergence of the death-defying, public-spirited Sioux hero who fights with grace and glory to save her followers.On the Rez vividly portrays the survival, through toughness and humor, of a great people whose culture has helped to shape the American identity.

I Am Not a Number


Jenny Kay Dupuis - 2016
    She tries to remember who she is and where she came from, despite the efforts of the nuns who are in charge at the school and who tell her that she is not to use her own name but instead use the number they have assigned to her. When she goes home for summer holidays, Irene's parents decide never to send her and her brothers away again. But where will they hide? And what will happen when her parents disobey the law? Based on the life of co-author Jenny Kay Dupuis’ grandmother, I Am Not a Number is a hugely necessary book that brings a terrible part of Canada’s history to light in a way that children can learn from and relate to.

Waterless Mountain


Laura Adams Armer - 1931
    This deeply moving and accurate account of one young Navaho's childhood and spiritual journey is filled with wonder and respect for the natural world—a living record of the Navaho way of life before the influence of the white man.

Stone Song: A Novel of the Life of Crazy Horse


Win Blevins - 1995
    Of all the iconic figures of Native American history, Crazy Horse remains the most enigmatic. To this day he strides across American history as a man who lived—and died—on his own terms. “’Stone Song’ is a deeply spiritual story about the soul journey of a great and mysterious American hero.” ~ The Dallas Morning News. Ridiculed as a boy for his white-man looks, he called for a vision, and received a great one . . . a vision that would shape his life. He was to fight for his people. In order to be successful, he must not accept traditional Lakota finery, rewards, and would sacrifice the dream of a wife and children. By following his vision, and his destiny of that as a mystic warrior, he was able to lead his people to their greatest victory—the defeat of General Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.Called to his monumental task, and tortured by his deeply passionate love of a woman, Crazy Horse found peace only in battle. Drawing inspiration from the eternal wisdom of his people, he discovered the means to defeat the U.S. Army at its own deadly game. Come enjoy this new 20th century Anniversary Edition with an intimate introduction by the author, Win Blevins.

Me Funny


Drew Hayden TaylorKaren Froman - 2005
    This fact remained unnoticed by most settlers, however, since non-aboriginals just didn’t get the joke. For most of written history, a stern, unyielding profile of “the Indian” dominated the popular mainstream imagination. Indians, it was believed, never laughed. But Indians themselves always knew better. As an award-winning playwright, columnist, and comedy-sketch creator, Drew Hayden Taylor has spent 15 years writing and researching aboriginal humor. For Me Funny, he asked a noted cast of writers from a variety of fields — including such celebrated wordsmiths as Thomas King, Allan J. Ryan, Mirjam Hirch, and Tomson Highway — to take a look at what makes aboriginal humor tick. Their hilarious, enlightening contributions playfully examine the use of humor in areas as diverse as stand-up comedy, fiction, visual art, drama, performance, poetry, traditional storytelling, and education.