Cynthia Ann Parker: The Story of Her Capture (1886)


James T. DeShields - 1886
    However, of equal interest are the rare stories of those captives who did not wish to escape but were forcibly rescued. One such story is that of Cynthia Ann Parker, mother of famous Comanche Chief Quanah Parker. In 1860, Comanches led by Chief Peta Nocona conducted numerous raids on various Texas settlements, culminating in the brutal violence. Texas Ranger Captain and future governor Lawrence S. Ross responded to these raids by attacking a Comanche camp on Pease River. Caught fleeing the destroyed Comanche camp was a woman with blue eyes who could not speak English and did not remember her birth name or details of her life prior to joining the Comanche. She proved to be Cynthia Ann Parker, taken prisoner by Comanches at the fall of Parker's Fort 24 years before. She had married a young Comanche chief named Peta Nocona, and had two boys and a baby girl. One of her sons, Quanah Parker, became one of the greatest Comanche chiefs of all time. In 1886, James T. DeShields published the book "Cynthia Ann Parker: The Story of Her Capture," which recounts events he had masterfully pieced together from narratives furnished Ross, various Parker relatives, together with most of the numerous partial accounts of the fall of Parker’s Fort and subsequent relative events. In describing Parker's return to her family, DeShields writes: "But as savage-like and dark of complexion as she was, Cynthia Ann was still dear to her overjoyed uncle, and was welcomed home by relatives with all the joyous transports with which the prodigal son was hailed upon his miserable return to the parental roof. As thorough an Indian in manner and looks as if she had been so born, she sought every opportunity to escape, and had to be closely watched...." About the author James Thomas DeShields (1861-1948), was a Texas historian and author of historical works including: • Border Wars of Texas • Two months in the camp of Big Bear • They Sat in High Places: The Presidents and Governors of Texas • The Fall of Parker's Fort • The Fergusons, "Jim and Ma"

Brother Frank's Gospel Hour: Stories


W.P. Kinsella - 1995
    These eleven stories continue the adventures of Silas Ermineskin and his sidekick Frank Fencepost, as Kinsella returns to the Cree Indian reserve in Hobbema, Alberta, where his cast of zany characters, last seen in The Fencepost Chronicles and The Miss Hobbema Pageant, is at its wry best.Here Frank Fencepost, true to form as a fast-talking con artist, outwits the Alberta Supreme Court in a hilarious cattle-insemination case in "Bull." In the title story he becomes an evangelizing Robin Hood, turning the government-sponsored K-U-G-H radio show into a scheme to use listeners' donations to fund listeners' wishes (and incidentally line his pockets), and in "Miracle on Manitoba Street" he visits a Montana reserve where he carves a picture of the Virgin Mary on a derelict Frigidaire and convinces the local medicine woman it's a miracle—one worthy of an admission charge.Not all the stories are humorous: "Dream Catcher" grapples with sexual violence when Silas's twelve-year-old sister is assaulted and Mad Etta, the community's four-hundred-pound medicine woman, provides a nightmare "cure" for the would-be rapist; "Ice Man" depicts gender discrimination, as Jason Twelve Trees fights to participate in a cooking competition despite his father's wish for him to become a mechanic; and "The Rain Birds" shows the consequences of the government's computer-driven corporate farms riding roughshod over the human and natural environment in western Canada.

38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier's End


Scott W. Berg - 2012
    Knowing the strength and resilience of the young American nation, Little Crow counseled caution, but anger won the day. Forced to either lead his warriors in a war he knew they could not win or leave them to their fates, he declared, “[Little Crow] is not a coward: he will die with you.” So began six weeks of intense conflict along the Minnesota frontier as the Dakotas clashed with settlers and federal troops, all the while searching for allies in their struggle. Once the uprising was smashed and the Dakotas captured, a military commission was convened, which quickly found more than three hundred Indians guilty of murder. President Lincoln, embroiled in the most devastating period of the Civil War, personally intervened in order to spare the lives of 265 of the condemned men, but the toll on the Dakota nation was still staggering: a way of life destroyed, a tribe forcibly relocated to barren and unfamiliar territory, and 38 Dakota warriors hanged—the largest government-sanctioned execution in American history. Scott W. Berg recounts the conflict through the stories of several remarkable characters, including Little Crow, who foresaw how ruinous the conflict would be for his tribe; Sarah Wakefield, who had been captured by the Dakotas, then vilified as an “Indian lover” when she defended them; Minnesota bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple, who was a tireless advocate for the Indians’ cause; and Lincoln, who transcended his own family history to pursue justice.Written with uncommon immediacy and insight, 38 Nooses details these events within the larger context of the Civil War, the history of the Dakota people, and the subsequent United States–Indian wars. It is a revelation of an overlooked but seminal moment in American history.

Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory


Claudio Saunt - 2020
    Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington’s small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government’s auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence. Unworthy Republic reveals how expulsion became national policy and describes the chaotic and deadly results of the operation to deport 80,000 men, women, and children.Drawing on firsthand accounts and the voluminous records produced by the federal government, Saunt’s deeply researched book argues that Indian Removal, as advocates of the policy called it, was not an inevitable chapter in U.S. expansion across the continent. Rather, it was a fiercely contested political act designed to secure new lands for the expansion of slavery and to consolidate the power of the southern states. Indigenous peoples fought relentlessly against the policy, while many U.S. citizens insisted that it was a betrayal of the nation’s values. When Congress passed the act by a razor-thin margin, it authorized one of the first state-sponsored mass deportations in the modern era, marking a turning point for native peoples and for the United States.In telling this gripping story, Saunt shows how the politics and economics of white supremacy lay at the heart of the expulsion of Native Americans, how corruption, greed, and administrative indifference and incompetence contributed to the debacle of its implementation, and how the consequences still resonate today.

The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management


David O. Renz - 2010
    New chapters cover developments in such areas as social entrepreneurship, financial leadership and capital structure, accountability and transparency, and the changing political-legal climate. It includes an instructor's manual

The Fetterman Massacre


Dee Brown - 1962
    Providing a vivid backdrop to the battle, Brown offers a portrait of Wyoming's Ft. Phil Kearney and the remarkable men who built and defended it. Based on a wealth of historical sources and sparked by Brown's narrative genius, "The Fetterman Massacre" is an essential look at one of the frontier's defining conflicts.

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.

Incident at Diamond Springs


Kendall Hanson - 2015
    When his stagecoach is caught between an outlaw militia and renegade braves, a veteran driver must figure out how to save his passengers and the lone survivor of a massacred way station.

Aboriginal Australians


Richard Broome - 1982
    Fully updated, this new edition explains the land rights struggle since Mabo, the Hindmarsh Island case, and debates over the stolen generation.

The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History


Joseph M. Marshall III - 2004
    Now, with the help of celebrated historian Joseph Marshall, we finally have the opportunity to know Crazy Horse as his fellow Lakota Indians knew him.Drawing on extensive research and a rich oral tradition that it rarely shared outside Native American circles, Marshall - himself a descendent of the Lakota community that raised Crazy Horse - creates a vibrant portrait of the man, his times, and his legacy. From the powerful vision that spurred him into battle to the woman he loved but lost to duty and circumstance, this is a compelling celebration of a culture, an enduring way of life, and the unforgettable hero who remains a legend among legends.Marshall's gloriously poetic and sweeping chronicle ushers in a new genre of American history...A tour de force. - Peter Nabakov, author of Native American TestimonyA remarkable portrait of a remarkable man. - Colin G. Calloway, professor of history and Samson Occom Professor of Native American Studies, Dartmouth College

Stolen Life: Journey Of A Cree Woman


Rudy Wiebe - 1998
    This is a story about justice, and terrible injustices, a story about a murder, and a courtroom drama as compelling as any thriller as it unravels the events that put Yvonne Johnson behind bars for life, first in Kingston's Federal Prison for Women until the riot that closed it, and presently in the Okimaw Ochi Healing Lodge in the Cypress Hills. But above all it is the unforgettable true story of the life of a Native woman who has decided to speak out and break the silence, written with the redeeming compassion that marks all Rudy Wiebe's writing, and informed throughout by Yvonne Johnson's own intelligence and poetic eloquence.Characters and events spring to life with the vividness of fiction. The story is told sometimes in the first person by Rudy Wiebe, sometimes by Yvonne herself. He tracks down the details of Yvonne's early life in Butte, Montana, as a child with a double-cleft palate, unable to speak until the kindness of one man provided the necessary operations; the murder of her beloved brother while in police custody; her life of sexual abuse at the hands of another brother, grandfather and others; her escape to Canada - to Winnipeg and Wetaskiwin; the traumas of her life thatled to alcoholism, and her slow descent into hell despite the love she found with her husband and three children.He reveals how she participated, with three others, in the murder of the man she believed to be a child abuser; he unravels the police story, taking us step by step, with jail-taped transcripts, through the police attempts to set one member of the group against the others in their search for a conviction - and the courtroom drama that followed. And Yvonne openly examines her life and, through her grandmother, comes to understand the legacy she has inherited from her ancestor Big Bear; having been led through pain to wisdom, she brings us with her to the point where she finds spiritual strength in passing on the lessons and understandings of her life. How the great-great-granddaughter of Big Bear reached out to the author of The Temptations of Big Bear to help her tell her story is itself an extraordinary tale. The co-authorship between one of Canada's foremost writers and the only Native woman in Canada serving life imprisonment for murder has produced a deeply moving, raw and honest book that speaks to all of us, and gives us new insight into the society we live in, while offering a deeply moving affirmation of spiritual healing.

Comanches: The Destruction of a People


T.R. Fehrenbach - 1974
    T. R. Fehrenbach traces the Comanches' rise to power, from their prehistoric origins to their domination of the high plains for more than a century until their demise in the face of Anglo-American expansion.Master horseback riders who lived in teepees and hunted bison, the Comanches were stunning orators, disciplined warriors, and the finest makers of arrows. They lived by a strict legal code and worshipped within a cosmology of magic. As he portrays the Comanche lifestyle, Fehrenbach re-creates their doomed battle against European encroachment. While they destroyed the Spanish dream of colonizing North America and blocked the French advance into the Southwest, the Comanches ultimately fell before the Texas Rangers and the U. S. Army in the great raids and battles of the mid-nineteenth century.This is a classic American story, vividly and poignantly told.

Lakota Woman


Mary Crow Dog - 1990
    Rebelling against the aimless drinking, punishing missionary school, narrow strictures for women, and violence and hopeless of reservation life, she joined the new movement of tribal pride sweeping Native American communities in the sixties and seventies. Mary eventually married Leonard Crow Dog, the American Indian Movement's chief medicine man, who revived the sacred but outlawed Ghost Dance. Originally published in 1990, Lakota Woman was a national best seller and winner of the American Book Award. It is a unique document, unparalleled in American Indian literature, a story of death, of determination against all odds, of the cruelties perpetuated against American Indians, and of the Native American struggle for rights. Working with Richard Erdoes, one of the twentieth century's leading writers on Native American affairs, Brave Bird recounts her difficult upbringing and the path of her fascinating life.

A Yellow Raft in Blue Water


Michael Dorris - 1987
    Starting in the present day and moving backward, the novel is told in the voices of the three women: fifteen-year-old part-black Rayona; her American Indian mother, Christine, consumed by tenderness and resentment toward those she loves; and the fierce and mysterious Ida, mother and grandmother whose haunting secrets, betrayals, and dreams echo through the years, braiding together the strands of the shared past.

Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People


Elizabeth A. Fenn - 2014
    We know of them mostly because Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805 with them, but why don't we know more? Who were they really? In this extraordinary book, Elizabeth A. Fenn retrieves their history by piecing together important new discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, geology, climatology, epidemiology, and nutritional science. Her boldly original interpretation of these diverse research findings offers us a new perspective on early American history, a new interpretation of the American past. By 1500, more than twelve thousand Mandans were established on the northern Plains, and their commercial prowess, agricultural skills, and reputation for hospitality became famous. Recent archaeological discoveries show how these Native American people thrived, and then how they collapsed. The damage wrought by imported diseases like smallpox and the havoc caused by the arrival of horses and steamboats were tragic for the Mandans, yet, as Fenn makes clear, their sense of themselves as a people with distinctive traditions endured. A riveting account of Mandan history, landscapes, and people, Fenn's narrative is enriched and enlivened not only by science and research but by her own encounters at the heart of the world.