Book picks similar to
Eyewitness at Wounded Knee by Richard E. Jensen
native-american
race-culture-ethnicity-american-ind
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Bone River
Megan Chance - 2012
In the mid-19th Century, on Shoalwater Bay, Washington Territory, Leonie Monroe Russell works alongside her oysterman husband, Junius. At night she continues her father’s lifelong obsession—collecting artifacts and studying the native culture that once thrived in area.On her thirty-seventh birthday, Leonie discovers a mummy protruding from the riverbank bordering her property—a mummy that by all evidence shouldn’t exist. As Leonie searches for answers to the mummy’s origins, she begins to feel a mystical connection to it that defies all logic. Leonie’s sense that otherworldly forces are at work only grows when news of the incredible discovery brings Junius’s long lost son, Daniel, to her doorstep. Upon his unexpected arrival, a native elder insists that Leonie wear a special shell bracelet for protection. But protection from whom? The mummy, or, perhaps, Daniel?Leonie has always been a good daughter and good wife, but, for the first time, these roles do not seem to be enough. Finding the mummy has changed everything, and now Leonie must decide if she has the courage to put aside the expectations of others to be the woman she was meant to be.
The Spell of New Mexico
Tony Hillerman - 1976
Included here are selections by Mary Austin, Oliver La Farge, Conrad Richter, D. H. Lawrence, C. G. Jung, Winfield Townley Scott, John DeWitt McKee, Ernie Pyle, Harvey Fergusson, and Lawrence Clark Powell. Hillerman's Preface and Introduction are choice specimens of his incisive humour and his own deep love of the state.
Citizen Coors: A Grand Family Saga of Business, Politics, and Beer
Dan Baum - 2000
From the moment when the dsitute Prussian Adolph Coors stows away to America in 1868, through the creation of the Heritage Foundation, to the global expansion of the billion-dollar Coors Brewing Company, the Coors family triumphed by iron-willed commitment to its own values -- values that ironically prove the family's undoing on both the business and political fronts.Acclaimed writer Dan Baum captures it all, from Adolph's Prohibition-provoked suicide to the banishment of an heir-apparent for marrying without permission. Baum vividly depicts the genius, eccentricity, and tragic weaknesses of the remarkable Coors family.
Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West
Hampton Sides - 2006
He had come to see if the rumors were true—if an army of blue-suited soldiers had swept in from the East and utterly defeated his ancestral enemies. As Narbona gazed down on the battlements and cannons of a mighty fort the invaders had built, he realized his foes had been vanquished—but what did the arrival of these “New Men” portend for the Navajo?Narbona could not have known that “The Army of the West,” in the midst of the longest march in American military history, was merely the vanguard of an inexorable tide fueled by a self-righteous ideology now known as “Manifest Destiny.” For twenty years the Navajo, elusive lords of a huge swath of mountainous desert and pasturelands, would ferociously resist the flood of soldiers and settlers who wished to change their ancient way of life or destroy them.
The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History
Paul Andrew Hutton - 2016
His kidnapping started the longest war in American history, and both sides--the Apaches and the white invaders—blamed him for it. A mixed-blood warrior who moved uneasily between the worlds of the Apaches and the American soldiers, he was never trusted by either but desperately needed by both. He was the only man Geronimo ever feared. He played a pivotal role in this long war for the desert Southwest from its beginning in 1861 until its end in 1890 with his pursuit of the renegade scout, Apache Kid. In this sprawling, monumental work, Paul Hutton unfolds over two decades of the last war for the West through the eyes of the men and women who lived it. This is Mickey Free's story, but also the story of his contemporaries: the great Apache leaders Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, and Victorio; the soldiers Kit Carson, O. O. Howard, George Crook, and Nelson Miles; the scouts and frontiersmen Al Sieber, Tom Horn, Tom Jeffords, and Texas John Slaughter; the great White Mountain scout Alchesay and the Apache female warrior Lozen; the fierce Apache warrior Geronimo; and the Apache Kid. These lives shaped the violent history of the deserts and mountains of the Southwestern borderlands--a bleak and unforgiving world where a people would make a final, bloody stand against an American war machine bent on their destruction.
The Captured
Scott Zesch - 2004
Traded to Comaches, he thrived in the rough, nomadic existence, quickly becoming one of the tribe's fiercest warriors. Forcibly returned to his parents after three years, Korn never adjusted to life in white society. He spent his last years in a cave, all but forgotten by his family.That is, until Scott Zesch stumbled over his own great-great-great uncle's grave. Determined to understand how such a "good boy" could have become "Indianized" so completely, Zesch travels across the west, digging through archives, speaking with Comanche elders, and tracking eight other child captives from the region with hauntingly similar experiences. With a historian's rigor and a novelist's eye, Zesch paints a vivid portrait of life on the Texas frontier, offering a rare account of captivity.
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.
The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West
Peter Cozzens - 2016
The expansion of the country and discoveries of gold drew whites to territory traditionally claimed by Indians. The Indian Wars would last more than three decades, permanently altering the physical and political landscape of America.The Earth Is Weeping is a sweeping, definitive history of the battles and negotiations that destroyed the Indian way of life even as they paved the way for the emergence of the United States we know today. Dramatically relating bloody and tragic events as varied as Wounded Knee, the Nez Perce War, the Sierra Madre campaign, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. As the action moves from the great Plains to Texas desert to the sheer cliffs of the Rockies and Sierra Madre, we encounter a pageant of fascinating characters including Custer, Sherman, Grant, and a host of officers, soldiers and indian agents, as well as great native leaders such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Red Cloud and the warriors they led. The Earth Is Weeping brings them all together for the first time in the fullest account to date of how the West was won—and lost.
Life Among the Apaches
John Carey Cremony - 1981
It was then that he first came in contact with the Apache people, and went on to learn about their ways first hand for nine years.As a result of their time in Mexico, the tribesmen could speak Spanish with Cremony and he became the first white man to master the Apache language. Though not all their encounters were peaceful, death and uncertainty surrounded his relationship with them.Many Americans were terrified of the Apaches, especially following the massacre at the Copper Mines of Santa Rita. Though not unprovoked, Cremony tells the story of the Apaches clever and brutal reaction to settler’s violence. Whilst Cremony learns from the Apaches, they are equally amazed by the things he shows them, from guns and medicine to photographs and the written language.In this insightful memoir, John Cremony talks about his time dealing with these incredible tribes. He delves in to their secret lives, revealing their highly intelligent and traditional ways."Like most frontiersmen of the mid-nineteenth century, John C. Cremony looked on Indians as unredeemable savages. But he knew Apaches first hand and was a keen and highly literate observer. For all its ethnocentrism, his narrative remains unsurpassed for accuracy and vivid detail among contemporary views of the Apaches. In the literature of the American West Life among the Apaches endures as a classic." Robert M. UtleyJohn Cremony (1815 – 1879) was an American journalist who joined the Massachusetts Volunteers in 1846, serving as a Spanish interpreter for the U.S Boundary Commission. After leaving the Volunteers, he went on to become the first editor for the San Francisco Sunday Times newspaper. Albion Press is an imprint of Endeavour Press, the UK's leading independent digital publisher. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.
People of the Weeping Eye
W. Michael Gear - 2008
For years he had wandered, leaving a trail of war, wonder, and broken love in his wake. Now he is headed home, called back by visions of chaos, blood, and fire. But there is more to the Seeker than most know. He is a man driven by a secret so terrible it may topple the greatest city in North America. When the far-off Katsinas told Old White it was time to go home, he had no idea that his journey would take him to the head of the Mississippi, where he would encounter the mystical Two Petals--a youngsoul woman obsessed with Spirit Power, who lives life backwards. But before Two Petals can find her way out of the future, Old White must heal the rift in her tortured soul. To do so, he will need the help of Trader, a loner consumed by his own dark past. People of the Weeping Eye is an epic set against the might and majesty of the great Mississippian Chiefdoms. The Gears have breathed new life into North America's forgotten heritage with a sweeping saga that will forever change your appreciation of our country.
The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Nathaniel Philbrick - 2010
Mythologized as Custer's Last Stand, the June 1876 battle has been equated with other famous last stands, from the Spartans' defeat at Thermopylae to Davy Crockett at the Alamo.In his tightly structured narrative, Nathaniel Philbrick brilliantly sketches the two larger-than-life antagonists: Sitting Bull, whose charisma and political savvy earned him the position of leader of the Plains Indians, and George Armstrong Custer, one of the Union's greatest cavalry officers and a man with a reputation for fearless and often reckless courage. Philbrick reminds readers that the Battle of the Little Bighorn was also, even in victory, the last stand for the Sioux and Cheyenne Indian nations. Increasingly outraged by the government's Indian policies, the Plains tribes allied themselves and held their ground in southern Montana. Within a few years of Little Bighorn, however, all the major tribal leaders would be confined to Indian reservations.Throughout, Philbrick beautifully evokes the history and geography of the Great Plains with his characteristic grace and sense of drama. "The Last Stand" is a mesmerizing account of the archetypal story of the American West, one that continues to haunt our collective imagination.
The Massacre at Fall Creek
Jessamyn West - 1975
It is 1824, and Indiana is the Western frontier of a new nation where Seneca warriors stand ready to fall on fledgling settlements should white men's justice fail. In a powerful American saga fashioned from the sparse historical record, Jessamyn West creates characters - an appealing heroine, her lover, the attorney for the defense, an extraordinary Indian seer - who stand at the center of a maelstrom of human emotions: hate, devotion, revenge, compassion, and, above all, love. As the narrative sweeps from the crimes to the tension-packed trial and its strangely moving aftermath, the novel carries the reader to an awareness of undeniably modern implications of our historical past.
The Oregon Trail
Francis Parkman - 1849
Detailed accounts of the hardships experienced while traveling across mountains and prairies; vibrant portraits of emigrants and Western wildlife; and vivid descriptions of Indian life and culture. A classic of American frontier literature.
Sin Killer
Larry McMurtry - 2002
Lord and Lady Berrybender have abandoned their home in England to broaden the horizons for themselves and their three children. With irascible determination—and a great deal of outright chaos—the party experiences both the awesome majesty and brutal savagery of the unexplored land, from buffalo stampedes and natural disasters to Indian raids and encounters with frontiersmen and trappers, explorers, pioneers, and one part-time preacher known as "the Sin Killer." Sin Killer, the strong, silent Westerner, captures the heart of the strong-willed, beautiful Berrybender daughter, Tasmin. But their fast developing relationship can only bring more trouble for the Berrybender's. Packed with breathtaking adventure, charming romance, and a sense of humor stretching clear over the horizon, Sin Killer is a truly unique view of the West that could only come from the boundless skill and imagination of Larry McMurtry.
Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War
Daniel J. Sharfstein - 2017
In the summer of 1877, General Oliver Otis Howard, a champion of African American civil rights, ruthlessly pursued hundreds of Nez Perce families who resisted moving onto a reservation. Standing in his way was Chief Joseph, a young leader who never stopped advocating for Native American sovereignty and equal rights. Thunder in the Mountains is the spellbinding story of two legendary figures and their epic clash of ideas about the meaning of freedom and the role of government in American life.