Crazy Horse: A Life


Larry McMurtry - 1999
    This superb biography looks back across more than 120 years at the life and death of this great Sioux warrior who became a reluctant leader at the Battle of Little Bighorn. With his uncanny gift for understanding the human psyche, Larry McMurtry animates the character of this remarkable figure, whose betrayal by white representatives of the U.S. government was a tragic turning point in the history of the West. A mythic figure puzzled over by generations of historians, Crazy Horse emerges from McMurtry’s sensitive portrait as the poignant hero of a long-since-vanished epoch.

Almost a Mother: Love, Loss, and Finding Your People When Your Baby Dies


Christy Wopat - 2018
    We never think it’s going to happen to us. We never think it will happen today. But it does, and it happened to Christy. In an effort to find solace, Christy tried Googling, “What do I do when my baby dies?” Unfortunately, there just aren’t many good resources out there—at least not any that are truly honest, not sugar-coated with clichés. “Almost a Mother: Love, Loss, and Finding Your People When Your Baby Dies” is Christy’s way of reaching out to those who have experienced a horrible loss of any kind, of any magnitude, in the hopes of building a community of support and love. And, in her words, “I just wanted to know that I wasn’t crazy because I wanted to punch the pregnant lady at Target in the face.”

Chuvalo: A Fighter's Life: The Story of Boxing's Last Gladiator


George Chuvalo - 2013
    After teaching himself the basics, he turned pro as an eighteen-year-old in 1956 and over the next twenty-three years fought some of the sport's greatest names: Joe Frazier, George Foreman and, most famously, Muhammad Ali (twice). Since retiring from the ring in 1979, Chuvalo has had to come to terms with a series of crushing body blows. His youngest son, a heroin addict, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Two other sons died from heroin overdoses. His first wife, overcome with grief, took her own life. Yet Chuvalo has stoically fought back. He formed his Fight Against Drugs foundation in 1996 and has spent the past seventeen years travelling across Canada and to parts of the United States, talking to tens of thousands of students and young adults about what happened to his family.An inspirational story of a Canadian icon, Chuvalo is both a top-flight boxing memoir and a poignant, hard-hitting story of coping with unimaginable loss.

Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir


Deborah A. Miranda - 2012
    Personal and strong, these stories present an evocative new view of the shaping of California and the lives of Indians during the Mission period in California. The result is a work of literary art that is wise, angry and playful all at once.

The Eighth Day Vol.1


M.M. Dos Santos - 2016
    Her religious parents try to fix her disturbing fantasies with prayers and scriptures. But Lili isn't suffering from fantasies, and her family isn't going to be able to save her as she fights for her sanity and for her life. The whispers are real, the nightmares are more than what they seem, and The Being waiting in the shadows wants to pull her into the darkness forever.But reality is much more sinister than any of her nightmares. Lili isn't the only one who hears whispers in the dark. Her parents pray to a god who has abandoned them. The demons do not live in the bible, nor do they hide in the shadows any longer. They are in minds of men. Whispering in their ears, a part of their very souls.The whispers become louder, the nightmares bleed into reality, and this presence refuses to be ignored.A twisted and disturbing journey through the dark side of humanity, The Eighth Day (Vol.1) is an epic tale of extreme horror that will terrorize your waking thoughts and haunt your dreams long after you've turned your last page.

Learning from Lincoln: Leadership Practices for School Success


Harvey B. Alvy - 2010
    The authors identify 10 qualities, attributes, and skills that help to explain Lincoln's effectiveness, despite seemingly insurmountable odds:1. Implementing and sustaining a mission and vision with focused and profound clarity2. Communicating ideas effectively with precise and straightforward language3. Building a diverse and competent team to successfully address the mission4. Engendering trust, loyalty, and respect through humility, humor, and personal example5. Leading and serving with emotional intelligence and empathy6. Exercising situational competence and responding appropriately to implement effective change7. Rising beyond personal and professional trials through tenacity, persistence, resilience, and courage8. Exercising purposeful visibility9. Demonstrating personal growth and enhanced competence as a lifetime learner, willing to reflect on and expand ideas10. Believing that hope can become a realityChapters devoted to each element explore the historical record of Lincoln's life and actions, then discuss the implications for modern educators. End-of-chapter exercises provide a structure for reflection, analysis of current behaviors, and guidance for future work, so that readers can create their own path to success--inspired by the example of one of the greatest leaders of all time.

Lawdog: The Life and Times of Hayden Tilden


J. Lee Butts - 2001
    Lee Butts! Legendary as the meanest, most fearless lawdog of the Old West, Hayden Tilden sometimes blurs the line between U.S. Marshal and hired assassin. His adventures all began with one murderous, cold-blooded bastard: Saginaw Bob Magruder. The depraved killer butchered Tilden’s entire family and hurled the young man into a ruthless, bloody crusade for vengeance and a career as a U. S. Marshal. Tracking down Magruder will be just the beginning of Tilden’s adventures, bringing his own brand of justice to the wild and lawless West. “Lawdog has it all. I couldn’t put it down.” —Jack Ballas, author of A Town Afraid “Lawdog should assume its rightful place beside other Western classics.” —Peter Brandvold, bestselling author of Once Hell Freezes Over About the Author: J. Lee Butts is the author of 22 published books and numerous magazine articles and short works. His book Brotherhood of Blood was runner-up for the Western Writers of America Spur Award in 2005. He’s worn many hats over the years (teacher, administrator, pool manager, IBM supervisor, and western author), and he and his late wife lived everywhere from Los Angeles to Dallas. Currently he’s hanging those hats back in White Hall, Arkansas.

The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic


Melanie McGrath - 2007
    "Nanook of the North" featured a mythical Eskimo hunter who lived in an igloo with his family in a frozen Eden. Nanook's story captured the world's imagination. Thirty years later, the Canadian government forcibly relocated three dozen Inuit from the east coast of Hudson Bay to a region of the high artic that was 1,200 miles farther north. Hailing from a land rich in caribou and arctic foxes, whales and seals, pink saxifrage and heather, the Inuit's destination was Ellesmere Island, an arid and desolate landscape of shale and ice virtually devoid of life. The most northerly landmass on the planet, Ellesmere is blanketed in darkness for four months of the year. There the exiles were left to live on their own with little government support and few provisions. Among this group was Josephie Flaherty, the unrecognized, half-Inuit son of Robert Flaherty, who never met his father. In a narrative rich with human drama and heartbreak, Melanie McGrath uses the story of three generations of the Flaherty family--the filmmaker; his illegitimate son, Josephie; and Josephie's daughters, Mary and Martha--to bring this extraordinary tale of mistreatment and deprivation to life.

Sanaaq: An Inuit Novel


Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk - 1987
    Composed in 48 episodes, it recounts the daily life of Sanaaq, a strong and outspoken young widow, her daughter Qumaq, and their small semi-nomadic community in northern Quebec. Here they live their lives hunting seal, repairing their kayak, and gathering mussels under blue sea ice before the tide comes in. These are ordinary extraordinary lives: marriages are made and unmade, children are born and named, violence appears in the form of a fearful husband or a hungry polar bear. Here the spirit world is alive and relations with non-humans are never taken lightly. And under it all, the growing intrusion of the qallunaat and the battle for souls between the Catholic and Anglican missionaries threatens to forever change the way of life of Sanaaq and her young family.About the translation:In the early 1950s, Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk was asked by a priest working in Kangiqsujuaq in northern Quebec to write down some Inuttitut phrases to assist him in the study of the language. At the age of twenty-two, Nappaaluk began writing but did not stop at mere phrases. She invented a group of characters and events and, over the next twenty years, wrote the first Inuit novel, simultaneously reinventing the novel form.Due in part to the perseverance of French anthropologist Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, Sanaaq was first published in syllabic Inuttitut in 1987. His French translation appeared in 2002. This English translation now brings this cornerstone of Inuit literature to Anglophone readers and scholars.

The Ecological Indian: Myth and History


Shepard Krech III - 1999
    But how truthful is this larger-than-life image? According to anthropologist Shepard Krech, the first humans in North America demonstrated all of the intelligence, self-interest, flexibility, and ability to make mistakes of human beings anywhere. As Nicholas Lemann put it in The New Yorker, "Krech is more than just a conventional-wisdom overturner; he has a serious larger point to make. . . . Concepts like ecology, waste, preservation, and even the natural (as distinct from human) world are entirely anachronistic when applied to Indians in the days before the European settlement of North America." "Offers a more complex portrait of Native American peoples, one that rejects mythologies, even those that both European and Native Americans might wish to embrace."—Washington Post

Coyote Stories


Mourning Dove - 1990
    He can be held up as a "terrible example" of conduct, a model of what not to do, and yet admired for a careless. anarchistic energy that suggests unlimited possibilities. Mourning Dove, an Okanagan, knew him well from the legends handed down by her people. She preserved them for posterity in Coyote Stories, originally published in 1933. Here is Coyote, the trickster, the selfish individualist, the imitator, the protean character who indifferently puts the finishing touches on a world soon to receive human beings. And here is Mole, his long-suffering wife, and all the other Animal People, including Fox, Chipmunk, Owl-Woman, Rattlesnake, Grizzly Bear, Porcupine, and Chickadee. Here it is revealed why Skunk's tail is black and white, why Spider has such long legs, why Badger is so humble, and why Mosquito bites people. These entertaining, psychologically compelling stories will be welcomed by a wide spectrum of readers.Jay Miller has supplied an introduction and notes for this Bison Books edition and restored chapters that were deleted from the original.

Blood Moon: An American Epic of War and Splendor in the Cherokee Nation


John Sedgwick - 2018
    Sedgwick’s subtitle calls the Cherokee story an ‘American Epic,’ and indeed it is.” —H. W. Brands, The Wall Street Journal An astonishing untold story from America’s past—a sweeping, powerful, and necessary work of history that reads like Gone with the Wind for the Cherokee.Blood Moon is the story of the century-long blood feud between two rival Cherokee chiefs from the early years of the United States through the infamous Trail of Tears and into the Civil War. The two men’s mutual hatred, while little remembered today, shaped the tragic history of the tribe far more than anyone, even the reviled President Andrew Jackson, ever did. Their enmity would lead to war, forced removal from their homeland, and the devastation of a once-proud nation. It begins in the years after America wins its independence, when the Cherokee rule expansive lands of the Southeast that encompass eight present-day states. With its own government, language, newspapers, and religious traditions, it is one of the most culturally and socially advanced Native American tribes in history. But over time this harmony is disrupted by white settlers who grow more invasive in both number and attitude. In the midst of this rising conflict, two rival Cherokee chiefs, different in every conceivable way, emerge to fight for control of their people’s destiny. One of the men, known as The Ridge—short for He Who Walks on Mountaintops—is a fearsome warrior who speaks no English but whose exploits on the battlefield are legendary. The other, John Ross, is descended from Scottish traders and looks like one: a pale, unimposing half-pint who wears modern clothes and speaks not a word of Cherokee. At first, the two men are friends and allies. To protect their sacred landholdings from white encroachment, they negotiate with almost every American president from George Washington through Abraham Lincoln. But as the threat to their land and their people grows more dire, they break with each other on the subject of removal, breeding a hatred that will lead to a bloody civil war within the Cherokee Nation, the tragedy and heartbreak of the Trail of Tears, and finally, the two factions battling each other on opposite sides of the US Civil War. Through the eyes of these two primary characters, John Sedgwick restores the Cherokee to their rightful place in American history in a dramatic saga of land, pride, honor, and loss that informs much of the country’s mythic past today. It is a story populated with heroes and scoundrels of all varieties—missionaries, gold prospectors, linguists, journalists, land thieves, schoolteachers, politicians, and more. And at the center of it all are two proud men, Ross and Ridge, locked in a life-or-death struggle for the survival of their people. This propulsive narrative, fueled by meticulous research in contemporary diaries and journals, newspaper reports, and eyewitness accounts—and Sedgwick’s own extensive travels within Cherokee lands from the Southeast to Oklahoma—brings two towering figures back to life with reverence, texture, and humanity. The result is a richly evocative portrait of the Cherokee that is destined to become the defining book on this extraordinary people.

A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with some of the Indian Tribes


Helen Hunt Jackson - 1881
    government’s flawed Indian policy and the unfair and cruel treatment afforded North American Indians by expansionist Americans. Jackson wrote the book as a polemic to "appeal to the hearts and conscience of the American people," who she hoped would demand legislative reform from Congress and redeem the country’s name from the stain of a "century of dishonor." Her efforts, which constitute a landmark in Indian reform, helped begin the long process of public awareness for Indian rights that continues to the present day.Beginning with a legal brief on the original Indian right of occupancy, A Century of Dishonor continues with Jackson’s analysis of how irresponsibility, dishonesty, and perfidy on the part of Americans and the U.S. government devastated the Delaware, Cheyenne, Nez Perce, Sioux, Ponca, Winnebago, and Cherokee Indians. Jackson describes the government’s treatment of the Indians as "a shameful record of broken treaties and unfulfilled promises" exacerbated by "a sickening record of murder, outrage, robbery, and wrongs" committed by frontier settlers, with only an occasional Indian retaliation. Such notable events as the flight of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perces and the Cherokee Trail of Tears illustrate Jackson’s arguments.Valerie Sherer Mathes’s foreword traces Jackson’s life and writings and places her in the context of reform advocacy in the midst of nineteenth century expansionism. This unabridged paperback edition contains an index, and the complete appendix, which includes Jackson’s correspondence concerning the Sand Creek Massacre and her report as Special Comminnioner to investigate the needs of California’s Mission Indians.

Klee Wyck


Emily Carr - 1941
    Her first book, published in 1941, was titled Klee Wyck ("Laughing One"), in honour of the name that the Native people fo the west coast gave her as an intrepid young woman. The book was a hit with both critics and the public, won the prestigious Governor Generals' Award and has been in print ever since.Emily Carr wrote these twenty-one word sketches after visiting and living with Native people, painting their totem poles and villages, many of them in wild and remote areas. She tells her stories with beauty, pathos and a vivid awareness of the comedy of people and situations.A few years after Carr's death, signifcant deletions were made to her book for an educational edition. This new, beautifully designed keepsake volume restores Klee Wyck to its original published verison, making the complete work available for th e first tim in more than fifty years. In her intriguing introduction, archivist and writer Kathryn Bridge puts Klee Wyck into the context of Emily Carr's life and reveals the story behind the expurgations.

A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System


John S. Milloy - 1999
    Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the “circle of civilization,” the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse.     Using previously unreleased government documents, historian John S. Milloy provides a full picture of the history and reality of the residential school system. He begins by tracing the ideological roots of the system, and follows the paper trail of internal memoranda, reports from field inspectors, and letters of complaint. In the early decades, the system grew without planning or restraint. Despite numerous critical commissions and reports, it persisted into the 1970s, when it transformed itself into a social welfare system without improving conditions for its thousands of wards. A National Crime shows that the residential system was chronically underfunded and often mismanaged, and documents in detail and how this affected the health, education, and well-being of entire generations of Aboriginal children.