Through these tales of adventure, edited and annotated by American Book Award nominee Landon Jones, we meet Indian peoples and see the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and western rivers the way Lewis and Clark first observed them -- majestic, pristine, uncharted, and awe-inspiring.

    Mohawk Saint is a work of history that situates her remarkable life in its seventeenth century setting, a time of wars, epidemics, and cultural transformations for the Indian peoples of the northeast. The daughter of a Algonquin mother and an Iroquois father, Catherine/Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680) has become known over the centuries as a Catholic convert so holy that, almost immediately upon her death, she became the object of a cult. Today she is revered as a patron saint by Native Americans and the patroness of ecology and the environment by Catholics more generally, the first Native North American proposed for sainthood.Tekakwitha was born at a time of cataclysmic change, as Native Americans of the northeast experienced the effects of European contact and colonization. A convert to Catholicism in the 1670s, she embarked on a physically and mentally grueling program of self-denial, aiming to capture the spiritual power of the newcomers from across the sea. Her story intersects with that of Claude Chauchetiere, a French Jesuit of mystical tendencies who came to America hoping to rescue savages from sin and paganism. But it was Claude himself who needed help to face down his own despair. He became convinced that Tekakwitha was a genuine saint and that conviction gave meaning to his life. Though she lived until just 24, Tekakwitha's severe penances and vivid visions were so pronounced that Chauchetiere wrote an elegiac hagiography shortly after her death.With this richly crafted study, Allan Greer has written a dual biography of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha and Chauchetiere, unpacking their cultures in Native America and in France. He examines the missionary and conversion activities of the Jesuits in Canada, and explains the Indian religious practices that interweave with converts' Catholic practices. He also relates how Tekakwitha's legend spread through the hagiographies and to areas of the United States, Canada, Europe, and Mexico in the centuries since her death. The book also explores issues of body and soul, illness and healing, sexuality and celibacy, as revealed in the lives of a man and a woman, from profoundly different worlds, who met centuries ago in the remote Mohawk village of Kahnawake.

    In the predawn hours of April 30, 1871, a combined party of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono Oaodham Indians gathered just outside an Apache camp in the Arizona borderlands. At the first light of day they struck, murdering nearly 150 Apaches, mostly women and children, in their sleep. In its day, the atrocity, which came to be known as the Camp Grant Massacre, generated unparalleled national attentionafederal investigations, heated debate in the press, and a tense criminal trial. This was the era of the United Statesa apeace policya toward Indians, and the Apaches had been living on a would-be reservation, under the supposed protection of the U.S. Army. President Ulysses Grant decried the act as apurely murder, a but American settlers countered that the distant U.S. government had failed to protect them from Apache attacks, and they were forced to take justice into their own hands. In the past century, the massacre has largely faded from memory. Now, drawing on oral histories, newspaper reports, and the participantsa own accounts, prizewinning author Karl Jacoby brings this horrific incident and tumultuous era to life. What brought this party together on that fateful April morning, and what led them to commit such a stunning act of violence? Shadows at Dawn traces the escalating conflicts, as well as the alliances, that transpired among the Americans, Mexicans, Apache, and Tohono Oaodham living in the borderlands over the course of several hundred years, beginning with the seventeenth-centuryarrival of the first Spanish missionaries. The American presence brought further transformations, especially after the Gadsden Purchase transferred a large swath of Mexican territory to the United States, leaving many Mexicans feeling like foreigners in their own land. By recounting the events from the perspective of each of the four parties involved, Jacoby challenges the dominance of the American version of the western story and also reveals the way each group has remembered, or forgotten, the massacre. Prodigiously researched and powerfully written, Shadows at Dawn examines a forgotten atrocity and in doing so paints a sweeping panorama of the southwestern border landsaa world far more complex, culturally diverse, and morally ambiguous than the traditional portrayals of the Old West.

    Some 300 Indians, led by Little Wolf, fought against General Crook and 10,000 troops, with only 60 finally making it through to freedom. Fast extensively researched this book in the late 1930s, visiting and speaking with Cheyenne experts in Norman, Oklahoma. This was the first of Fast's many books to gain a wide popular audience; it was eventually made by John Ford into the classic film Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

    For the next 300 years, Spaniards ranged through the continent building forts, missions and farms, ranches and towns to reconstruct the Iberian world.

    Visitors marvel at the impressive ruined pueblos and spectacular cliff dwellings but often have little idea of the cultures that produced these prehistoric wonders. Stephen Plog, who has spent decades working in the region, provides the most readable and up-to-date account of the predecessors of the modern Hopi and Pueblo Indian cultures in this well-received account. Ten thousand years ago, humans first colonized this seemingly inhospitable landscape with its scorching hot deserts and freezing upland areas. The initial hunter-gatherer bands gradually adapted to become sedentary village groups, and the high point of Southwestern civilization was reached with the emergence of cultures known to archaeologists as Anasazi, Hohokam, and Mogollon in the first millennium A.D. Chaco Canyon became the center of a thriving Anasazi cultural tradition. It was the hub of a trading network extending over hundreds of miles, whose arteries were a series of extraordinary roads that are still being discovered and mapped. To the south lay the settlement of Snaketown, focus of the Hohokam, where the inhabitants built courts for a ritual ball game--intriguing echoes of ancient Mexican practices. The Mogollon people of the Mimbres Valley created some of the world's finest ceramics, decorated with human figures and mythical creatures. Interweaving the latest archaeological evidence with early first-person accounts, Professor Plog explains the rise and mysterious fall of Southwestern cultures. As he concludes, despite the depredations and diseases introduced by the Europeans, the Southwest is still home to vibrant Native American communities that carry on many of the old traditions.

    He has affirmed his innocence ever since--his case was made fully and famously in Peter Matthiessen's bestselling In the Spirit of Crazy Horse--and many remain convinced he was wrongly convicted. Prison Writings is a wise and unsettling book, both memoir and manifesto, chronicling his life in Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. Invoking the Sun Dance, in which pain leads one to a transcendent reality, Peltier explores his suffering and the insights it has borne him. He also locates his experience within the history of the American Indian peoples and their struggles to overcome the federal government's injustices.

    Sitting Bull's life spanned the entire clash of cultures and ultimate destruction of the Plains Indian way of life. He was a powerful leader and a respected shaman, but neither fully captures the enigma of Sitting Bull. He was a good friend of Buffalo Bill and skillful negotiator with the American government, yet erroneously credited with both murdering Custer at the Little Big Horn and with being the chief instigator of the Ghost Dance movement. The reality of his life, as Bill Yenne reveals in his absorbing new portrait, Sitting Bull, is far more intricate and compelling. Tracing Sitting Bull's history from a headstrong youth and his first contact with encroaching settlers, through his ascension as the spiritual and military leader of the Lakota, friendship with a Swiss-American widow from New York, and death at the hands of the Indian police on the eve of the massacre at Wounded Knee, Yenne scoured rare contemporary records and consulted Sitting Bull's own "Hieroglyphic Autobiography" in the course of his research. While Sitting Bull was the leading figure of Plains Indian resistance his message, as Yenne explains, was of self-reliance, not violence. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull was not confronting Custer as popular myth would have it, but riding through the Lakota camp making sure the most defenseless of his tribe--the children--were safe. In Sitting Bull we find a man who, in the face of an uncertain future, helped ensure the survival of his people.

    But then, when she comes across a puppeteer so talented that he can make the puppets talk and dance as if they were little humans, Mouse realizes that true happiness is within reach -- and the key is learning how to make the puppets dance! What she doesn't realize, however, is just how much she and her prospective mentor have in common and how much, one day, they will share.