The insights contained in the book originate from ancient indigenous cultures. According to what the author learned from his elders, human beings always have a choice between the path of competition and the path of cooperation. The healing of the earth depends on the healing of humanity and will only become possible as we return to a relationship of cooperation with all of life. In order to do this we first need to return to ourselves, remembering our original, inherent wisdom. Indigenous people believe that we humans have all the necessary talents to be caretakers of Mother Earth. This book reveals our true capacities in a strong and clear way, offering the reader not only information, but a real opportunity to participate in the work that needs to be done to save our planet.

    Too often ignored or underemphasized in favor of their male warrior counterparts, Native American women have played a more central role in guiding their nations than has ever been understood. Many Native communities were, in fact, organized around women's labor, the sanctity of mothers, and the wisdom of female elders. In this well-researched and deeply felt account of the Ojibwe of Lake Superior and the Mississippi River, Brenda J. Child details the ways in which women have shaped Native American life from the days of early trade with Europeans through the reservation era and beyond.The latest volume in the Penguin Library of American Indian History, "Holding Our World Together" illuminates the lives of women such as Madeleine Cadotte, who became a powerful mediator between her people and European fur traders, and Gertrude Buckanaga, whose postwar community activism in Minneapolis helped bring many Indian families out of poverty. Drawing on these stories and others, Child offers a powerful tribute to the many courageous women who sustained Native communities through the darkest challenges of the last three centuries.

    Hailed by Robert Creeley as "both a deeply useful work book and an unequivocal delight," and by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the hundred most recommended American books of the last thirty-five years, it appears here in a revised and expanded version several years in the making. Rothenberg's revision follows the structure and themes of the original version while reworking the contents to include a European section and a large number of newly gathered and translated poems that reflect the work set in motion since 1968.

    Set on a North Dakota reservation, this book weaves the stories of the old and the young, broken families, romantic rivals, and men and women in love and at war.

    At this sight a thrill of icy coldness passed over me; I thought I had been struck; my thoughts began to reel and became irregular and confused; I fainted and sank to the earth, and for a while, I know not how long, I was insensible.” – Olive Oatman On the North American continent, Native American tribes carried out abductions against the new European settlers from the time they first set foot on eastern shores. Some of the women taken in the colonial to early American period went on to become respected figures in their new environments, while others lived out their lives as slaves. Various tribes perceived the historical value of women’s social personalities through different prisms, and even those groups living in the same region often exhibited dissimilar behavior toward them. For some of the more aggressive tribal societies, to commit atrocities against women and their children engaged the same mindset as that adopted for male-to-male warfare. What European sensibilities failed to grasp, despite the home continent’s own lurid history, was that the numerous indigenous cultures of North America were already in the habit of perpetrating such abductions against each other and had for thousands of years. Whether the enemy was European or domestic, old or young, male or female, the deeply embedded cultural habit was the same. To steal women from an enemy often brought the same adulation from the collective as the stealing of horses, and abduction initiated by even a single individual brought honor to that person and his family. In the American wilderness, instances occurred wherein the abduction of either horses or human beings was considered essential to survival, if not to pride and manhood. Abductees were generally adopted into the tribe through a specific ritual. Some were based on “violent hazing,” while for others, entry into the community was a “mere formality.” Children and adolescents were, more often than not, the preferred choice for abduction. In the capturing of slaves, both the strength and docility of the individual taken was of utmost importance. However, in the absence of viable wives, the concept of exogamy, an effort to bring new blood into the tribe, was encouraged. Such a rejuvenation of the community was widely accepted as a convention of war. In the history of abductions among the North American continent’s tribes, a low rate of escape attempts by captured settlers has been the norm from the beginning. This may be largely due to geographical obstacles, with help being so far away as to discourage hope of success. By the same token, relatively few rescue attempts were made by white kinsman to rescue a family member from an indigenous tribe. With no contact available to them, families of lost members taken from the colonial period through the 19th century usually fell into a long-term state of grief, but resigned themselves to never seeing their loved ones again. The Captivity of the Oatman Girls: The History of the Young Sisters Who Were Abducted by Native Americans in the 1850s examines the history of one of the most famous abduction stories of the Old West, the kidnapping of the young Oatman sisters and their subsequent experiences with the Mojave.

    Yet the true story begins much earlier, and its final recent chapter adds a major twist. Jake Page, one of the Southwest's most distinguished writers and a longtime student of Indian history and culture, tells a radically new story, thanks to an explosion of recent archaeological findings, the latest scholarship, and an exploration of Indian legends. Covering no less than 20,000 years, "In the Hands of the Great Spirit" will forever change how we think about the oldest and earliest Americans.Page writes gracefully and sympathetically, without sentimentality. He explores every controversy, from the question of cannibalism among tribes, to the various theories of when and how humans first arrived on the continent, to what life was actually like for Indians before the Europeans came. Page dispels the popular image of a peaceful and idyllic Eden, and shows that Indian societies were fluid, constantly transformed by intertribal fighting, population growth, and shifting climates.Page uses Indian legends and stories as tools to uncover tribal origins, cultural values, and the meaning of certain rituals and sacred lands. He tells the story of contact with Europeans, and the multipower conflicts of the Seven Years War, the Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812, from the Indians' point of view. He explains the complex and shifting role of the U.S. government as expressed through executive decisions and through the role of the courts. Finally, he tells the fascinating story ofthe late-twentieth-century upsurge in Indian population and resources, which began as a social movement and exploded once casinos came into fashion.Author and editor of over a dozen books on American Indian life and culture, Page is a masterful teller of this incredible story. "In the Hands of the Great Spirit" will forever change the familiar story of recent centuries, replacing it with a far more sweeping and meaningful story of tribes and peoples who have suffered enormously yet endure and enrich the American experience.

    "Compelling reading—an epic narrative history." —Publishers Weekly

    The invasion of white society threatens to change their traditional way of life, and they must choose to fight or assimilate. The story is a powerful portrait of a fading way of life. The story culminates with the historic Marias Massacre of 1870, in which the U.S. Cavalry mistakenly killed a friendly band of Blackfeet, consisting mostly of non-combatants."A major contribution to Native American literature." -- Wallace Stegner.

    Here, one of the most famous ethnographers of the late 19th century has written them down and published his collection. The cover displays the N.C. Wyeth painting Spring.

    For more than a thousand years before the Europeans came, a great culture flourished on these islands. In 1900 and 1901 the linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last traditional Haida-speaking storytellers, poets, and historians. Robert Bringhurst worked for many years with these manuscripts, and here he brings them to life in the English language. A Story as Sharp as a Knife brings a lifetime of passion and a broad array of skills—humanistic, scientific, and poetic—to focus on a rich and powerful tradition that the world has long ignored.

    But in her memoir, she offers a different perspective. In My Own Moccasins is an unflinching account of addiction, intergenerational trauma, and the wounds brought on by sexual violence. It is also the story of sisterhood, the power of ceremony, the love of family, and the possibility of redemption.With gripping moments of withdrawal, times of spiritual awareness, and historical insights going back to the signing of Treaty 8 by her great-great grandfather, Chief Bigfoot, her journey exposes the legacy of colonialism, while reclaiming her spirit.

    His newfound Christianity is shaken by the loss of his master and a life-threatening injury. Following after his Mennonite friends, he goes to the time-displaced American town of Grantville and is overwhelmed by culture shock. He decides to return to the New World as a missionary. Only half a dozen warring powers and thousands of miles of ocean can block him, until he’s almost stopped by an unexpected event; love. A storm, a baby, a near-shipwreck, and a timely rescue finally see him back in his homeland. Now, all he has to do is to reach for his dreams.

    Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors, then forced to descend into the “mouth of hell” of eighteenth-century silver mines or, later, made to serve as domestics for Mormon settlers and rich Anglos. Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery, more than epidemics, that decimated Indian populations across North America. New evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, Indian captives, and Anglo colonists, sheds light too on Indian enslavement of other Indians — as what started as a European business passed into the hands of indigenous operators and spread like wildfire across vast tracts of the American Southwest. The Other Slavery reveals nothing less than a key missing piece of American history. For over two centuries we have fought over, abolished, and tried to come to grips with African-American slavery. It is time for the West to confront an entirely separate, equally devastating enslavement we have long failed truly to see.

    The white man had burned their land, raped their women, and slaughtered their children.  He had made them a nation of slaves, and those he could not enslave, he promised to destroy.  The Apache had one hope: vengeance.Out of the scattered remnants of the Apache tribes rose a man whose cunning, ferocity, and genuis for warfare would make him their leader in a last tragic struggle for survival.  The Apache gave him their arms, their strength, and their absolute devotion.  The white man gave him his name: Geronimo!

    Afflicted by epidemics and their consequences from the 1770s until the 1940s, Alaska Natives are still feeling traumatic effects in the form of alcoholism, suicide and violence. The wholeness of a society that maintained health and vigor for thousands of years was broken by the Great Death and has not been repaired by anti-poverty programs, welfare, government-sponsored health and education programs, or prohibition laws. Through bitter experience, Napoleon, a Yupik Eskimo, has acquired clarity in understanding the roots and tenacity of these problems, articulating them clearly and powerfully. But more than this, he offers a message of hope pointing the way toward cultural revitalization that can begin now. The steps in the journey to reclaiming health and well-being depends on communicating the sorrow and loss and embracing a new way of thinking about the problem. While there is much work to be done, this work shows a way that individuals and villages can transform the Great Death into new life.Napoleon’s narrative is followed by commentaries from elders and academics concerned with understanding and overcoming the challenges that Alaska Natives face today.