New Books in Indigenous Studies

Between 1902 and 1934, hundreds of Native American men, women, and children were institutionalized at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians; only nine of them, however, were officially committed by court order. In Vanished in Hiawatha: The Story of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), independent scholar Carla Joinson examines the history of the only insane asy...

Rebecca Fraser is a writer, journalist, and broadcaster whose work has been published in Tatler, Vogue, The Times, and The Spectator. President of the Bronte Society for many years, she is the author of a biography of Charlotte Bronte that examines her life in the context of contemporary attitudes about women. Her last book was The Story of Britain, a single-volume history of how England was gover...

Jeffrey H. Cohen, a professor at The Ohio State University, has managed a rare feat: placing anthropology classics like Argonauts of the Western Pacific in the context of eating grasshoppers. His impressively readable Eating Soup without a Spoon: Anthropological Theory and Method in the Real World (University of Texas Press, 2015) is a retrospective on his first foray into the field, but it does a...

In less than thirty years, California’s Indian population fell from 150,000 to 30,000. In An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (Yale University Press, 2016), Benjamin Madley, Associate Professor of History at UCLA, argues that war or disease can’t explain this population drop. The state and federal government carried out genocide against Californ...

In The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Douglas Hunter examines the history of meanings, affinities, and petroglyph studies of Dighton Rock. First noticed by colonists in 1680, by the nineteenth century Massachusetts’ Dighton Rock was one of the most famous and contested artifacts of American antiquity. This forty...

In the summer of 1885, the Lakota Sioux holy man Sitting Bull toured North America as a member of Buffalo Bill Cody’s famous “Wild West” show. His participation, as Deanne Stillman explains in her book Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill (Simon & Schuster, 2017) linked two celebrities of Gilded Age America into an association that would endure...

America’s national experience and collective history have always been subject to transnational forces and affected by global events and conditions. In recognition of this reality, the textbook Global Americans: A History of the United States (Cengage, 2017) presents a history of North America and then the United States in which world events and processes are central rather than colorful sidelights...

In an activist application of her scholarly discipline, Dr Liz Conor’s Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women (UWA Publishing, 2016) acknowledges its dual potential to disturb and to incite a reckoning – giving life to Audre Lorde’s famous quote that the learning process is something to be incited, like a riot. Using travelogues, cartoon strips, missionary diaries, paintings and lithog...

The intersection of colonialism and mass atrocities is one of the most exciting insights of the past years of genocide studies. But most people don’t really think of the Soviet Union and the American west as colonial spaces. But while there are limitations to this, both fit well into a kind of geography of colonialism. This is why Edward Westermann‘s new book Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars:...

Clyde Warrior was a Ponca Indian who in the 1960s was one of the founders of the “Red Power” movement for the rights of Native Americans. While his name may not be as well-known as that of other civil rights leaders of that decade, as Paul McKenzie-Jones reveals in this biography Clyde Warrior: Tradition, Community, and Red Power (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), he was as just as pivotal a fi...

Coll Thrush’s new book is an imaginative and beautifully-written history of London framed by the experiences of indigenous travelers since early modernity. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016) brings together urban and indigenous histories, arguing that indigenous people around the world have actively engaged with and helped create the world we c...

Scholars have long treated cities as spaces in which indigenous people have little presence and less significance. This notion that urbanity and indignity stand at odds results from a potent mix of racist essentialism and the historical myth of progress from savagery to civilization. Just as this paradigm excludes native peoples from the City, it excludes them from modernity. Perhaps no city expre...

Kelly Watson’s Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World (New York University Press, 2015) explores the history of the New World through the lens of the cannibal myth. Watson establishes that accusations of cannibalism in the Americas during the early modern period became a valuable discursive tool to justify the European imperial project. She shows how e...

The West, particularly the mountain West of states like Colorado, Utah, Idaho, has long had an image as a land of white men. This image dates to the 19th century, yet it is counterintuitive. Before it became a white man’s paradise, the West was the land of Native Americans, immigrants, Hispanics, and even occasionally free blacks. In his new book, Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the Cre...

I grew up in Michigan, in the United States, where I was surrounded by places named with Native American names. I drove to Saginaw to play in basketball tournaments and to Pontiac to watch an NBA team play. Now in Kansas, I live near towns called Kiowa and Cherokee. But for much of my life, despite my profession as an historian, names like these were just background noise in the everyday reality o...

Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Harvard University Press, 2016) maps the intricate, intersecting channels of information exchange in the early American South, exploring how people in the colonial world came into possession of vital knowledge in a region that lacked a regular mail system or a printing press until the 1730s. Challenging the notion of early colonial America...

Heather Miyano Kopelson explores how religion, primarily expressed through bodily action, contributed to colonial notions of difference in her recent book Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (NYU Press, 2014). She examines the religious rituals of Taíno, Algonquian, and West African peoples in the New World, and how they intersected with Puritan theology and expr...

On November 11, 2015, leaders and citizens of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy–Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk and Tuscarora–will gather in the small lakeside city of Canandaigua, New York to commemorate the 221st anniversary of a monumental treaty. Negotiated between the Confederacy and representatives of new federal government in the autumn of 1794, the Treaty of Cananda...

Owning property. Being property. Becoming propertyless. These are three themes of white possession that structure Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s brilliant new inquiry into the dynamics of race and Indigeneity in “postcolonizing” societies like Australia. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) collects and expands over a decade of work tha...

13,000-years ago, the people of the first identifiable culture in North America were hunting mammoth and mastodon, bison, and anything else they could launch their darts and spears at, and undoubtedly, most assuredly, they themselves were being hunted by gigantic short-faced bears, America lions and saber-toothed cats. Thus, in order to survive life in the Pleistocene, Clovis people developed a so...

In this episode of New Books in Archaeology we talk with Douglas B. Bamforth about his new book The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska (University of New Mexico Press, 2015). Bamforth focuses primarily on Paleoindian land use represented by the Allen Site and the adjacent smaller sites... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becomi...

When Howard Zinn published A People’s History of the United States in 1980, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was thrilled. “I used it as a text immediately,” she remembers. Comrades in the movement anti-war movement, Zinn and Dunbar-Ortiz shared a belief that a radically different kind of history, freed from patriotic bluster, was desperately needed. But Dunbar-Ortiz was also concerned by Zinn’s narrative. Wh...

In his new book Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the ‘Good Indian’ (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), Michael Ray FitzGerald reviews how television represented Native Americans, including in both positive and negative stereotypes. He talks about these portrayals from early television shows to more recent characterizations.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/...

For as long as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick has been a staple of the American literary canon, one element often goes unnoticed. The ship commanded by the monomanacial Ahab on his quest to slay the great white whale is named the Pequod, just one letter of difference from Pequot, a Native nation living within what is now southern New England. Perhaps Mellville was just participating in the widespread...

Last month, VICE NEWS released a short documentary about the Navajo Nation called “Cursed by Coal.” The images and stories confirm the title. “Seems like everything’s just dying out here,” says Navajo citizen Joe Allen. “It’s because of the mine. Everything is being ruined. They don’t care about people living on that land.” About four hundred miles southwest of the Four Corners Power Plant, where...