New Books in Native American Studies

The American West has always been home to many deities, argues Jennifer Graber in The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (Oxford University Press, 2018). Graber, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Texas-Austin, tells the story of the Kiowa over the course of the long nineteenth century. For Kiowas, the continuation of well-established spiritual beliefs and practices sustained them in the face of great challenges, but at times these same elements were dynamic enough to change and adapt to fit new realities. Among the new realities were alliances with powerful neighbors such as the Comanche, with whom the Kiowa shared the Sun Dance ritual. Another was a growing rivalry and at times widespread bloodshed with Americans, whose Christian missionaries fought as much amongst themselves as they did for Native converts. Missionaries often operated under the guise of being “friends of the Indian,” even when their purposes were ultimately dispossession and cultural erasure. The Gods of Indian Country is a deep look at how one Native American society and their settler colonial conquerors  relied upon faith in the face of both success and failure, joy and sorrow, in a rapidly changing West. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In this sweeping new biography, Colin G. Calloway, John Kimball Jr. 1943 Professor of History and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, uses the prism of George Washington’s life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time—Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Red Jacket, Little Turtle—and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America’s founding. The Indian World of George Washington (Oxford University Press, 2018) spans decades of Native American leaders’ interactions with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands, to his military career against both the French and the British, to his presidency, when he dealt with Native Americans as a head of state would with a foreign power, using every means of diplomacy and persuasion to fulfill the new republic’s destiny by appropriating their land. By the end of his life, Washington knew more than anyone else in America about the frontier and its significance to the future of his country. The Indian World of George Washington offers a fresh portrait of the most revered American and the Native Americans whose story has been only partially told. Calloway’s biography invites us to look again at the history of America’s beginnings and see the country in a whole new light. Ryan Tripp teaches history at several community colleges, universities, and online extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), David J. Silverman argues that Indian societies adopted firearm technology not because they were visually impressive or culturally significant (though they were both), but simply because they killed more efficiently. Using his concept of the “gun frontier,” Silverman, a professor of history at George Washington University, shows how contact between Natives and those Europeans willing to trade weapons for furs and other goods fundamentally altered the politics and power dynamics of a given region. Thundersticks draws on case studies from a broad sweep of time from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century, including the consolidation of Iroquois power, King Philip’s War, the otter fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, and the ascendency of the Blackfeet in the mountain west. Each story underscores the point that guns could both undermine colonial power as well as cause catastrophic conflict between Indian societies. Firearms changed Indian societies in innumerable ways, but when the gun trade lagged, so too did an individual polity’s power. Silverman’s book is a complicated, nuanced, look at how post-contact North America has long been a wildly interconnected place, and how it became a continent filled with blood and smoke. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The ancient Maya are popularly known for their calendar, but their concept of time and the metaphysics surrounding that conception are not. In Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time (Lexington Books, 2018), Alexus McLeod reconstructs an ancient Mayan metaphysical system based on key texts and other artifacts plus using analogies with ancient Chinese philosophical thought. On his view, the Maya held that we can understand everything in temporal terms but that everything does not reduce to time, and that humans have a role in constructing manifest time and organizing the manifest world. McLeod, who is associate professor of philosophy and Asian studies at the University of Connecticut, also considers Mayan views of essences, truth, personal identity, and meaning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

“Native American” is unique among American racial categories in defining not just social status or historical lineage, but also an individual’s relationship to state and federal governments. In Who Belongs?: Race, Resources, and Tribal Citizenship in the Native South (Oxford University Press, 2016), Mikaela M. Adams, an assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi, tracks the histories of six Indian societies in the American South from the seventeenth to the twenty first centuries. In doing so, she argues that the question of belonging was often difficult to answer, particularly in a region where whites insisted on dividing the individuals along a strict, binary, color line. In Who Belongs?, Pamunkey, Catawba, Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Miccosukee communities all grapple with the fundamental question of tribal membership. After colonization and conquest, the answer to the question posed by Adams could have critical and concrete consequences. Often, whether someone belonged to a given tribe determined fundamental questions of identity, financial restitution, and land ownership. Who Belongs? is a critical retelling of the Native south which emphasizes the fungible nature of group identity and the adaptations Native communities made to survive within a settler colonial system of state power. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Not all city dwellers are bipedal, according to Frederick L. Brown, author of The City is More Than Human: An Animal History of Seattle (University of Washington Press, 2016). The history of Seattle, and all cities, is as much about its non-human inhabitants as its human ones, argues Brown, an independent scholar working on a contractual basis with the National Park Service. Salish-speaking people, the earliest inhabitants of the Puget Sound, had myriad relationships with animals. They thought of them as important symbols and as spiritual guides, and used them as a critical resource base. The species of animals living around the Puget Sound changed with European arrival and conquest, but the complicated relationships they had with humans did not. Cattle, horses, mountain lions, dogs, and salmon, all meant different things to different people at different times. Brown tracks these changes in use and attitude and argues that our perception of animals is shaped by the paradox of the pet food dish. The bowl we put out for our cats and dogs, Brown says, is an enduring symbol of our fraught relationship to creatures we by turns, eat, ignore, or love, depending on the context and the species in question. The history of the human city is indeed much more than a human history. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism (Oregon State University Press, 2017), Natchee Blu Barnd examines how Indigenous populations create space and geographies through naming, signage, cultural practices, and artistic expression within the confines of settler colonialism in the United States. Native Space explores these acts as everyday cultural practices, and also examines how settler societies deploy the concept of Indian-ness to create colonial geographies. Barnd takes an interdisciplinary approach toward these subjects, and examines these concepts through the use of demographic and cartographic data, stories, and imagery, each of which underscores the different methods Native peoples use to unsettle settler society and reclaim Indigenous spaces. Samantha M. Williams is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the history of the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada through the lenses of settler colonialism and public history. She can be reached at swillia7@ucsc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. In Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (Vintage, 2018) author and New Yorker staff writer David Grann (The Lost City of Z) narrates why and how, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history. ______________________________________________________________________________ Ryan Tripp is teaches history at several community colleges, universities, and online extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota and originally from Pine Ridge Reservation, has become one of the most important voices in the Indigenous foods revitalization movement. By researching in the archives, visiting elders, and experimenting with new uses for traditional ingredients and techniques, he has created a new vision for modern Native American cuisine. That vision is realized inThe Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Particularly making use of the traditional foods of Minnesotan tribal peoples, his company The Sioux Chef and the related non-profit North American Traditional Food Systems (NATIFS) have now released their first cookbook with the University of Minnesota Press, described as follows: “Sherman dispels outdated notions of Native American fare—no fry bread or Indian tacos here—and no European staples such as wheat flour, dairy products, sugar, and domestic pork and beef. The Sioux Chef’s healthful plates embrace venison and rabbit, river and lake trout, duck and quail, wild turkey, blueberries, sage, sumac, timpsula or wild turnip, plums, purslane, and abundant wildflowers. Contemporary and authentic, his dishes feature cedar braised bison, griddled wild rice cakes, amaranth crackers with smoked white bean paste, three sisters salad, deviled duck eggs, smoked turkey soup, dried meats, roasted corn sorbet, and hazelnut-maple bites.” James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Tore T. Petersen, Professor of International and American Diplomatic History at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, studies the final wars on the prairie from the Native American perspective in The Military Conquest of the Prairie: Native American Resistance, Evasion and Survival, 1865-1890 (Sussex Academic Press, 2016). When the reservation system took hold about one-third of tribes stayed permanently there, one-third during the harsh winter months, and the last third remained on what the government termed un-ceded territory, which Native Americans had the right to occupy by treaty. For the Federal government it was completely unacceptable that some Indians refused to submit to its authority. Both the Red River war (1874-75) in the south and the great Sioux war (1876-77) in the north were the direct result of Federal violation of treaties and agreements. At issue was the one-sided violence against free roaming tribes that were trying to maintain their old way of life, at the heart of which was avoidance on intermingling with white men. Contrary to the expectations of the government, and indeed to most historical accounts, the Native Americans were winning on the battlefields with clear conceptions of strategy and tactics. They only laid down their arms when their reservation was secured on their homeland, thus providing their preferred living space and enabling them to continue their way of life in security. But white-man perfidy and governmental double-cross were the order of the day. The Federal government found it intolerable that what it termed “savages” should be able to determine their own future. Vicious attacks were initiated in order to stamp out tribalism, resulting in driving the US aboriginal population almost to extinction. Analysis of these events is discussed in light of the passing of the Dawes Act in 1887 that provided for breaking up the reservations to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 that gave a semblance of justice to Native Americans. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies