Native American Studies

Writing from a vantage point that respects tribal specificities and Indigenous sovereignty, the essays in this volume consider the relational place-worlds crafted by the Native America authors. Each is set in conversation with kindred writers and larger sociopolitical debates in the Americas, Africa, and Europe. The shared aim is to decolonize academic methodologies and disciplines across the Atlantic by tracing the creative, spiritual, and intellectual networks that Native writers have established with other communities at home and around the world. Key issues to arise include Native American/Indigenous theories and literary practices that center on relationality, the planetary turn, grounded normativity, trans-Indigeneity, transborder identities, movement, journeying, migration, multilingualism, genomic research, futurity, ecology, and justice.

Prior to 1492, eight plants--corn, beans, squash, chile, tomato, potato, vanilla, and cacao--existed only in the Americans. When these ingredients crossed the ocean, they drastically transformed the way the Old World would eat and cook forever. Yet the average American, even those who cook with these foods regularly, doesn't know this history. Seed to Plate, Soil to Sky introduces the splendor and importance of Native culinary history and pairs it with delicious Native American-inspired dishes. Grounded in a primer on Native American cuisine and with a necessary discussion of food sovereignty and sustainability, Seed to Plate, Soil to Sky shares more than 100 nutritious, plant based recipes organized by each of the foundational ingredients. Many of these recipes emphasize southwest cuisine.

Unpapered is a collection of personal narratives by Indigenous writers exploring the meaning and limits of Native American identity beyond its legal margins. Native heritage is neither simple nor always clearly documented, and citizenship is a legal and political matter of sovereign nations determined by such criteria as blood quantum, tribal rolls, or community involvement. Given that tribal enrollment was part of a string of government programs and agreements calculated to quantify and dismiss Native populations, many writers who identify culturally and are recognized as Native Americans do not hold tribal citizenship. Unpapered charts how current exclusionary tactics began as a response to “pretendians”—non-indigenous people assuming a Native identity for job benefits—and have expanded to an intense patrolling of identity that divides Native communities and has resulted in attacks on peoples’ professional, spiritual, emotional, and physical states. An essential addition to Native discourse, Unpapered shows how social and political ideologies have created barriers for Native people truthfully claiming identities while simultaneously upholding stereotypes.

The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, as a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non-Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century.

In 2012, Matika Wilbur sold everything in her Seattle apartment and set out on a Kickstarter-funded pursuit to visit, engage, and photograph people from what were then the 562 federally recognized Native American Tribal Nations. Over the next decade, she traveled six hundred thousand miles across fifty states--from Seminole country (now known as the Everglades) to Inuit territory (now known as the Bering Sea)--to meet, interview, and photograph hundreds of Indigenous people. The body of work Wilbur created serves to counteract the one-dimensional and archaic stereotypes of Native people in mainstream media and offers justice to the richness, diversity, and lived experiences of Indian Country.

In the summer of 2017, twenty-two-year-old Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind vanished. A week after the pregnant woman disappeared, police arrested the white couple who lived upstairs from Savanna and emerged from their apartment carrying an infant girl. The baby was Savanna's, but she would not be found until her body was pulled from the Red River days later. This horrifying and unimaginable crime sent shockwaves through the country and helped bring to light the overwhelming sexual and physical violence Native American women and girls have endured since the country's colonization. With pathos and respect, Searching for Savanna confronts the history and attitudes towards these women and why our government has turned its back on the countless victims by highlighting this specific tragic case.

In this wide-ranging historical study of federal Indian law-the field of U.S. law related to Native peoples-attorney and educator Peter P. D'Errico argues that the U.S. government's assertion of absolute prerogative and unlimited authority over Native peoples and their lands is actually a suspension of law. Combining a deep theoretical analysis of the law with a historical examination of its roots in Christian civilization, D'Errico presents a close reading of foundational legal cases and raises the possibility of revoking the doctrine of domination. The book's larger context is the increasing frequency of Indigenous conflicts with nation-states around the world as ecological crises caused by industrial extraction impinge drastically on Indigenous peoples existences. D'Errico's goal is to rethink the role of law in the global order-to imagine an Indigenous nomos of the earth, an order arising from peoples and places rather than the existing hegemony of states.

Navajo scholar Amanda Tachine takes a personal look at 10 Navajo teenagers, following their experiences during their last year in high school and into their first year in college. It is common to think of this life transition as a time for creating new connections to a campus community, but what if there are systemic mechanisms lurking in that community that hurt Native students' chances of earning a degree? Tachine describes these mechanisms as systemic monsters and shows how campus environments can be sites of harm for Indigenous students due to factors that she terms monsters' sense of belonging, namely assimilating, diminishing, harming the worldviews of those not rooted in White supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, racism, and Indigenous erasure. This book addresses the nature of those monsters and details the Indigenous weapons that students use to defeat them.

Restoring Relations introduces, synthesizes, and analyzes traditional stories by Dine and Dene storytellers in orature and film. Restoring storied autonomy, identities, kinship, and languages is coming to a state of harmony, beauty, wellness, peace, and balance by recognizing hane' (story/narrative) in oral, literary, and visual formats (spoken, published, directed, and beaded). The book conceptualizes narrative autonomy as hane'tonomy and visual storytelling from a Diné perspective and offers a map for restorying that resists inauthentic and misappropriated stories. The base of the argument privilege Indigenous narratives and how these narratives are tied to land and relations. In the book's final movement, the author explores the power of story to forge ancestral and kinship ties between the Diné and Dene, across time and space through re-storying of relations.

During the 20th century, one building-the octagonal stacked-log hogan-emerged to become a powerful and inspiring symbol of Diné culture. This book describes the rise of the octagonal stacked-log hogan as the most important architectural form among the Diné. This book explains how a specific hogan form-the octagonal stacked-log hogan-emerged as a powerful and inspiring symbol of Diné culture. irtually every Diné community on the reservation has a school, a senior citizens' center, an office building, or a community center that intentionally evokes the stacked-log hogan. Populated by an array of octagonal public architecture and by the hogan-one of the few Indigenous dwellings still in use during the 21st century-the Navajo Nation maintains a deep connection with tradition.

This liberally illustrated exploration of 'the Navajo worldview' presents a lively back and forth conversation fielding a wide breadth of topics, including the remarkably complex architecture of the Navajo language, the coalescing history of its people bolstered by the evidence of genetics, the unique healing system that focuses on a reordering of an individual in need, the Navajo rock wall imagery within an earlier ancestral area known as the Dinétah, the focus on mountains within their worldview, the Western misrepresentation of the concept and role of the Navajo female, the use of language to create a reality, and the overarching identification with an earthly life of 'beauty'. In a final chapter, Harry Walters animates these discussions with spirited specific memories of his own long life and that of prior generations of his family, stretching back to the 1864-1868 internment that included both his grandfather, who as a boy survived captivity, and his great-grandfather who did not.

For almost fifty years, coal dominated the Navajo economy. But in 2019 one of the Navajo Nation's largest coal plants closed. This comprehensive new work offers a deep dive into the complex inner workings of energy shift in the Navajo Nation. Geographer Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation, examines the history of coal development within the Navajo Nation, including why some Diné supported coal and the consequences of doing so. He explains the Navajo Nation's strategic choices to use the coal industry to support its sovereignty as a path forward in the face of ongoing colonialism. Carbon Sovereignty demonstrates the mechanism of capitalism through colonialism and the construction of resource sovereignty, in both the Navajo Nation's embrace and its rejection of a coal economy. For the people of the Navajo Nation, energy sovereignty is dire and personal. Thanks to on-the-ground interviews with Diné coal workers, environmental activists, and politicians, Curley documents the real consequences of change as they happened. While some Navajo actors have doubled down for coal, others have moved toward transition. Curley argues that political struggles ultimately shape how we should understand coal, capitalism, and climate change.

This book sheds light on the tangle of federal and state education programs that have been imposed on Navajo territories, and on the ongoing efforts by tribal communities to transfer state authority over Diné education to the Navajo Nation. The complex and confusing educational system, influenced by colonial pressures and tribal resistance, limits movements towards a unified tribal educational sovereign goal.

This is the first anthology to bring together Diné writers of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose into a single collection of Navajo literature. The book includes author biographies and interviews with a selections of the writers' most important creative work, as well as a chronology and resources for teachers and readers.

The Navajo tribe, the Diné, are the largest tribe in the United States and live across the American Southwest. But over a century ago, they were nearly wiped out by the Long Walk, a forced removal of most of the Diné people to a military-controlled reservation in New Mexico. The summer of 2018 marked the 150th anniversary of the Navajos' return to their homelands. One Navajo family and their community decided to honor that return. Edison Eskeets and his family organized a ceremonial run from Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, to Santa Fé, New Mexico, in order to deliver a message and to honor the survivors of the Long Walk. Both exhilarating and punishing, Send a Runner tells the story of a Navajo family using the power of running to honor their ancestors and the power of history to explain why the Long Walk happened. From these forces, they might also seek the vision of how the Diné--their people--will have a future.

Our Fight Has Just Begun revises history, documents anti-Indianism, and gives voice to victims of racial violence. Navajo scholar Cheryl Redhorse Bennett reveals a lesser-known story of Navajo activism and the courageous organizers that confronted racial injustice and inspired generations.Illuminating largely untold stories of hate crimes committed against Native Americans in the Four Corners region of the United States, this work places these stories within a larger history, connecting historical violence in the United States to present-day hate crimes. Bennett contends that hate crimes committed against Native Americans have persisted as an extension of an “Indian hating” ideology that has existed since colonization, exposing how the justice system has failed Native American victims and families.

First published in 1928, My people the Sioux is one of the first, published, books from a Native American author. It's author, Luther Standing Bear, was a Sicangu and Oglala Lakota graduate of Carlisle Boarding School, who also served as an activist for native peoples. My People the Sioux contains much in common with standard American Indian Studies materials. It is an educated native person, who is speaking from a native voice. Their calls for balance between western traditions and native traditions is a sentiment that is repeated by several authors, including Vine Deloria Jr. Luther Standing Bear's work provides interesting insights into the perspectives of Native American reformers in the early 20th century, and provides insight into the challenges and perspectives of this time.

First published in 1968, N. Scott Momaday published his first novel, "A House Made of Dawn." While the work is fiction, it was one of the first works by an American Indian to gain widespread recognition among non-natives. The book began a revolution in American Indian writing known as the "Native American Renaissance." His work, describing a story of a man caught between the world of the reservation, and the western world, would integrate the Native American worldview into storytelling. It was works of Native American literature such as these, that spurred the creation of journals in American Indian studies such as the Wíčazo Ša Review and Studies in American Indian Literature, further bringing Native peoples into the University.

First published in 1969, Custer Died for Your Sins is widely considered to be the first American Indian Studies book published. Despite its relative age, Custer Died for Your Sins remains a significant work. Deloria tackles 11 different issues that he felt were most critical for native peoples in the 1960's. His work covers over a broad spectrum of issues including religion, education and politics. His conclusion is also unique, emphasizing the importance of corporatization (a conclusion which some tribes have taken, to a small extent). Like with Standing Bear's work, it serves as an excellent historical piece that reflected the issues of the 1950's and 60's, and what concerned Indians most during that time period. The discussion on corporatization remains interesting and potent.

First published in 1971, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is one of the first historical works (and certainly the most prominent of these works) to focus on telling the history of the American west from the perspective of the indigenous peoples who were displaced during the move westward. The work begins with a brief mention of American Indian history before the 1800s and ending with the infamous Massacre at Wounded Knee. Each chapter focuses on a different conflict between different tribes and the federal government. The work makes extensive use of Native sources and tells the work from a Native perspective even if the author was not Native himself. The work makes extensive use of oral history. While the work was generally well received in its time (and still now), some scholars have criticized Brown's analysis as perpetuating stereotypes that Native peoples are dead and gone, rather than still living on in their tribes.

Francis Paul Prucha's 1986 work The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians was a landmark work which covered over the history of the federal government's interactions with native tribes. The book is organized chronologically with divisions made for the different eras of American Indian policy, focusing from the independence of the U.S. to the "present day" (1980's). While the book was praised by historians for its level of detail, sources and scope, it has had a lukewarm reception from many American Indian Studies scholars. While Prucha provides an excellent overview of interactions from the perspective of the federal government, relying heavily on government sources, his coverage of the American Indian perspective, and his use of American Indian sources is limited. In addition, he doesn't really use the decolonization/colonization framework. However, his work does provide some indications of where native/federal relationships are headed.

The Sacred Hoop is a prominent work by Laguna Pueblo author, Paula Gunn Allen that was originally published in 1986. During the 1980s, authors like bell hooks began to emphasize the importance of intersectionality of race and gender. In her work, Allen continues this movement, arguing that Indigenous narratives and societies (as reflected in European writings) frequently downplayed the role of women. Paula Gunn Allen chronicles this as well as attempts by contemporary women authors and politicians to retake traditional, women-centric, traditions, especially in literature.

All our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life is a monograph by Winona Laduke, a prominent White Earth Ojibwe politician, activist and environmentalist published in 1999. Her work, which is organized based on tribes, focuses on the environmental issues that plague native peoples. These range from PCB contamination in the water, nuclear waste disposal and the destruction of the native food sources. Eight of her 10 chapters focuses on a different tribe, and the issues they are facing, with the final two chapters focusing on potential, large scale, solutions to those issues. Her work represents the intersection of Native Studies, politics, and environmental science, reflecting the intersectionality of American Indian Studies. The colonization/decolonization framework is filtered through the lens of environmentalism, with the destruction of the environment being tied in with the colonization of the environment.