The suspension of the so-called “Indian Wars” did not signal colonialism’s end, only a different battlefield. “The calvary man was supplanted–or, rather, supplemented–by the field matron, the Hotchkiss by the transit, and the prison by the school,” writes Beth H. Piatote. “A turn to the domestic front, even as the last shots at Wounded Knee echoed in America’s collective ear, marked not the end of conquest but rather its renewal.”

Yet the domestic space was not only a target of invasion; it was also a site of resistance, a fertile ground for Native authors to define what counted as love, home, and kin in an era of coercive assimilation. In Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale University Press, 2013), Piatote brilliantly reads the work of late nineteenth century writers like Pauline Johnson, S. Alice Callahan, D’arcy McNickle and others as a contest over settler domestication. Piatote offers an eloquent exploration of incredible courage and literary acumen, with resonance in our own political moment.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] Most people today think of war–or really violence of any sort–as for the most part useless. It’s better, we say, just to talk things out or perhaps buy our enemies off. And that usually works. But what if you lived in a culture where fighting was an important part of social status and earning a living? What if, say, you couldn’t get married unless you had gone to war? What if, say, you couldn’t feed your family without raiding your enemies? Such was the case with Chiricahua Apache of the Southwest. As Lance R. Blyth shows in his terrific book Chirichahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680-1880 (Nebraska UP, 2012), war was a necessary part of Chiricahua life, at least in the 17th and 18th centuries. They needed to fight the Spanish in Janos, and there was nothing the Spanish could really do to stop them, at least in the long term. Of course the Spanish–who were, it should be said, invaders–fought back. And so the two communities entered into a two century-long struggle that only ended with the “removal” of the Chiricahua Apache by the United States in the nineteenth century. Listen to Lance tell the fascinating story.

Can the spoken word be a reliable record of past events?

For many Native people, the answer is unequivocally affirmative. Histories of family, tribe, and nation, narratives of origin and migration, foodways and ceremonies, and the provisions of countless treaties have been passed down through successive generations without written documents. The colonizing society has maintained a starkly different view, elevating the written word to a position of authority and dismissing the authenticity of oral tradition. Are these two views irreconcilable?

Exploring the contested memorialization of four controversial episodes in the history of the Delaware (or Lenape) Indians’ encounter with settlers, Andrew Newman finds unexpected connections between colonial documents, recorded oral traditions, and material culture. On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) is a thoughtful meditation on how we know the past.

Joy Porter is the author of Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America (University of Nebraska Press, 2011).  She has also written several other publications, including, To Be Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker (University of Oklahoma Press, 2001) and Land & Spirit in Native America (Praeger Press, 2012), and she co-edited a book with Kenneth M. Roemer, entitled The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2005).  In her latest book, she carefully tells the fascinating story of an elusive subject that sparks many historical debates: the organizational history and inclusion of Native American freemasons in America.  She covers the broad chronology of freemasonry in general, from the British origins in the  sixteenth-century to freemasonry in America from the eighteenth- to the twentieth-centuries. She explains how freemasonry is one of many institutions that exemplified the process of the transatlantic exchange of ideas from Europe to the Americas.  More specifically, she examines the Native American freemasonry from an interdisciplinary approach, such as using theories from performance studies and socio-psychological ideas of associationalism.  Furthermore, she examines Native American freemasonry from the lense of understanding the idea of “ornamentalism” (a concept borrowed from Edward Said’s work, Orientalism) to evoke the historical and racial perceptions of Native Americans from the colonial era, and how some of these ideas shifted over time.  Listen in.

Deploying hashtags and hunger strikes, flash mobs and vigils, the Idle No More movement of First Nation peoples in Canada is reaching a global audience. While new technology and political conditions alter the landscape of dissent, Indigenous activists using a wide tactical array to further their demands is not anything new, the media’s breathless claims notwithstanding.

Frederick E. Hoxie has composed a powerful new book highlighting this truth. In eight moving chapters stretching from the American Revolution to the contemporary period of self-determination, This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made (Penguin 2012) introduces us to courageous men and women whose names might not be familiar but whose legacies are still felt. Facing down a settler state determined on their erasure, they struggled to carve out a place for Native nationhood within — but not necessarily of – the polity that surrounded them.

Colin Calloway is one of the leading historians of Native American history today and an award- winning author. Calloway is the John Kimball, Jr. 1943 Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hanover, and has been part of the institution for several decades.  He has published a textbook, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (Bedford/St. Martin’s), which has a fourth edition published in 2012.

Not surprisingly, he has also published a fascinating new work entitled Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Dartmouth College Press, 2010).  When we think about the history of Indian education, we may think about the broad legacy of educating Native Americans at boarding schools from the late-nineteenth to the twentieth century, or more specifically about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, or Native American educational program that existed at Hampton University, the historically black college in Virginia.  However, Calloway covers a much older legacy of Native American education rooted in the eighteenth-century, and continues to the present-day at Dartmouth College.

As an alumna of the College, I was always fascinated by the “Indian history” at this institution. Some current ways the college pays homage to its original mission include recruiting Native American students, supporting academic and student resources, such as the Native American Studies department, and the Native American Program which hosts college-wide events, such as the upcoming 40th annual Pow Wow held in May.  Calloway’s book provides greater insight into understanding how the shadows of Dartmouth’s complicated colonial history of Native American education are viewed today.  Listen in to learn more about this fascinating study.

Just east of the Norwich-New London Turnpike in Uncasville, Connecticut, stands the Mohegan Congregational Church. By most accounts, it’s little different than the thousands of white-steepled structures dotting the New England landscape: the same high-backed wooden chairs, high ceilings, images of lordly white men. To the careful observer, there is one notable distinction. Just above a traditional cross near the front entrance hangs a single, perfect eagle feather.

The juxtaposition might be startling for some. But as Brown historian Linford D. Fisher beautifully illuminates in The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2012), Native cultures in New England – and, indeed, most everywhere – are highly incorporative, blending elements of Christian religious practice with their own.

This was never more the case than during the eighteenth century evangelical revival known to scholars as the First Great Awakening. A significant turning point in American spiritual life, Native peoples of New England are often left out of the narrative. When they’re included, it’s as passive targets of conversion. Fisher tells a dramatically different story.

(Many thanks to New Books in American Studies host Benjamin Smith for composing our new intro music!)

Despite what you may have learned in undergraduate surveys or high school textbooks, the nineteenth century was not one long and inexorable march toward Indian dispossession — the real story is far more tragic. As historian Joseph Genetin-Pilawa masterfully relates in his new book Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Native and non-Native reformers developed a host of viable policy alternatives to allotment and forced assimilation in the post-Civil War years.

Seizing the ferment of Reconstruction, dynamic figures like Ely Parker – briefly featured in Speilberg’s Lincoln –  attempted to harness the power of  a growing federal government to protect indigenous nations from rapacious land loss and cultural genocide, only to be outmaneuvered by elite “humanitarian” forces who equated dispossession with progress. Adeptly synthesizing the study of American political development with post-colonial thought, and demonstrating an keen attentiveness to human agency within the limitations of larger structures, Genetin-Pilawa excavates the “repressed alternatives” of late nineteenth century Indian policy, destabilizing a narrative too often presented as inevitable.

“Museums can be very painful sites for Native peoples,” writes Amy Lonetree, associate professor of history at UC-Santa Cruz and a citizen of the Ho Chunk Nation, “as they are intimately tied to the colonization process.”

Such a contention appears incongruous to most; museums are supposed to be places of wonder and learning, after all, pillars of our democratic culture. But consider the history. From the wholesale plunder of cultural artifacts and human remains — “If you desecrate a white grave, you wind up in prison,” Walter Eco-Hawk puts it, “but desecrate an Indian grave, and you get a Ph.D.” — to racist representations of disappearance and primitivity, museums are deeply implicated in colonialism.

Yet as Lonetree powerfully proposes in Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), it doesn’t need to be that way. Assessing new efforts of collaboration, accountability, and control at Mille Lacs Indian Museum, The National Museum of the American Indian, and The Ziibiwing Center of Anishinaabe Culture & Lifeways, Lonetree lays out a path toward decolonization, putting these once aloof institutions to the task of sovereignty, survivance, and the telling of hard truths. This work is not only politically vital, but ultimately makes for a better museum.

Brendan C. Lindsay‘s impressive if deeply troubling new book centers on two concepts long considered anathema: democracy and genocide. One is an ideal of self-government, the other history’s most unspeakable crime. Yet as Lindsay deftly describes, Euro-American settlers in California harnessed democratic governance to expel, enslave and ultimately murder 90% of a population on their ancestral homelands in the mid-to-late 19th century.

Murder State: California’s Native Genocide, 1846-1873 (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) is difficult but vital reading for residents of any state. Culling evidence from newspapers, public records, and personal narratives, Lindsay’s lays out an ironclad case that “genocide” is precisely the word to describe to the process faced by Native people in California, despite its rarified usage in academic and public discourse.

Most historians have understood Native American history through the use of the “middle ground” metaphor. Notably, historian Richard White used this metaphor to explain the social relationships between Native American with European Americans in the Great Lakes region in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. Increasingly, more studies have also emerged to explain such encounters between Native Americans and African Americans, particularly in the Southeast. Angela Pulley Hudson, Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M, is firmly engaged within this wide body of literature in her first published monograph, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). She vividly describes the history of Creeks and their ideas about encounters with outsiders of their land along the geographic borders of Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee from the early national era to the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Her work not only contributes to the analysis of contested borderlands in American history, but also complicates our understanding about the intersections of racial, gender and kinship boundaries in an eloquent way that makes for a great read.

Most readers are probably more familiar with the context of slavery or captivity in the context the African slave trade than in the Americas. Some may assume that slavery in the Americas was exclusively a phenomenon that became institutionalized into chattel slavery and racially codified exclusively against African Americans by the seventeenth-century.  There has been increased scholarly attention over the last decade to expand our ideas of slavery, including scholarship about enslavement of African Americans within the “Five Civilized Tribes.”  However, there has been little focus on the long and nuanced history of Native American captivity practices.

Historian Christina Snyder argues that we have to re-imagine the history of captivity by understanding the evolution of such practices amongst Native Americans in her prize-winning book, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2010).  Captivity practices existed amongst many indigenous nations from the pre-Columbian era throughout the nineteenth-century.   She broadly describes the evolution of these  practices from incorporating captives into kin networks, and to shifting notions of slavery that became codified by race.   She begins her work by vividly describing Mississippian indigenous cultures of the pre-Columbian era, including the fascinating history of Cahokia, and the captives who were buried in these mounds. She also discusses the roles of Native American women, including Cherokee “beloved women” would were closely involved in determining the fate of captives.   Her work is captivating and extensive, and greatly contributes to the historiography.

The term “Indian Country” evokes multiple themes. Encompassing legal, geographic, and ideological dimensions, “Indian Country” is commonly understood to be a space outside of or surrounded by the boundaries of the United States. It’s also been used for a pan-tribal, continental consciousness, found, for example, in the popular periodical Indian Country Today. For non-Natives familiar with the term, however, it’s safe to say what the term does not connote: cities. Indian County is “out there” somewhere, a dusty reservation remote from the bustle of modern life.

Historian Nicolas G. Rosenthal argues that this concept is not only problematic but wholly inaccurate. In Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2012),  Rosenthal illuminates the forces that drew or forced Indian people to Los Angeles, the “urban Indian capital of the United States,” and the process of forming individual and communal identities away from tribal homelands. Los Angeles typifies a larger trend. In 1940, the census counted 27,000 Indians living in cities, about 8% of the total Native population. By 1950, it spiked to 45%. In 1980, 53%. While the majority of Rosenthal’s compelling narrative focuses on city of angels, he also reckons with these wider trends, reconceptualizing “Indian Country” to reflect a complicated and diverse reality. His intervention is invaluable.

Late in 1872, as the United States sought to clear the newly incorporated Southwest of its indigenous inhabitants, a company under Capt. James Burns came upon an encampment of Kwevkepayas (a branch of Yavapais) sheltering in the shadow of rock overhang above the Salt River Canyon. The soldiers wasted no time on the formalities of battle. They rained down fire, bullets ricocheting from the roof the cave, felling the refugees below. They even pushed down boulders. None survived.

Well, almost none. A few days prior, the advancing soldiers had come across a young boy of eight or nine looking for a missing horse. “They made a rush for me,” Hoomothya would later write. “They pulled me over rocks and bushes. The men didn’t care whether I got hurt or not.” But unlike Burns’ Kwevkepaya siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandfather, the invaders did not kill him. In fact, the man responsible for his family’s extermination would adopt the young Hoomothya as something between a son and a servant, renaming him Mike Burns.

Over a century later, the prolific writer and editor Gregory McNamee has brought us Burns’ remarkable story. In The Only One Living to Tell: The Autobiography of a Yavapai Indian (University of Arizona Press, 2012), Burns recounts his survival of the massacre, his time as a scout for the U.S. military on the campaign against Geronimo, his education  in white schools, and eventual reconnection with his Yavapai community. “Mike Burns lived in two worlds,” McNamee tell us, “and he was at home in neither.” But his intelligence, humor and compassion illuminates both in profound and unexpected ways.

The birth of the American republic produced immense and existential challenges to Native people in proximity to the fledgling nation. Perhaps none faced a greater predicament than the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (popularly known as the Iroquois). Divided by the U.S.-English conflict, their landbase ransacked by American soldiers and speculators, their once considerable political power reduced, and their culture threatened by an influx of zealous missionaries — such is what historian Matthew Dennis in his powerful new book, Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), has termed “the colonial crucible.”

Yet, Dennis persuades us, “the Seneca story is not mere prologue.” One of the Six Nations residing in what became western New York State, the Seneca adapted to the invasion of their homeland, building upon elements of their culture and selectively embracing change to survive the economic and political transformations of the post-Revolutionary period. The revelations of the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, blended with elements of Christianity, yielded a new and powerful religion that rejected white degradation. But in the process, the prophet challenged the powerful position of women in Seneca society, as accusations of witchcraft – newly focused on women – led to violence.

As western New York continues its decades long process of deindustrialization, losing population with every closed down factory, the Seneca Nation remains, vibrant as ever. Matthew Dennis’ fascinating new book helps us see just how they did.

Somewhere in Oklahoma, a restless student with an iPhone set to silent is stealthily texting, much to the chagrin of their teacher. This is about as common a scene as you might expect to find in a modern classroom. Only something’s different here: the student is texting in Cherokee. When Apple released its 2010 version of the ubiquitous device, they included a brand new feature – full use of the Cherokee Syllabary.

While the technology might be new, the Cherokee’s endless ability to adapt is not. Indeed, the eighty-six character syllabary may be the most dramatic adaptation in the nation’s long and illustrious history. In the early eighteenth century, during the decades before Indians of the Southeast were violently forced west, a Cherokee silversmith named Sequoyah embarked on a revolutionary project: the construction of the first indigenous writing system in North America. Within years of its completion, nearly the entire nation was fluent and a vibrant new era of Cherokee publishing was born.

Ellen Cushman, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and an associate professor at Michigan State University, traces this dramatic story in her compelling new book, The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People’s Perseverance (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011). Moving the conversation away from an alphabet-centric approach which sees the syllabary as a corollary of English, Cushman places Sequoyan in the matrix of Cherokee peoplehood and reveals its unique and enduring connection to the  tribe’s perseverance. As the Cherokee Nation embarks on an ambitious plan to stem the erosion of their language – a troubling trend among the world’s indigenous peoples – Cushman’s book adds fascinating new dimensions to this crucial project.

Here’s a study-guide prepared to accompany the interview. 

For as much as recent decades have witnessed a patriarchal backlash against the growing visibility of LGBTQ people in North American society, there is another, increasingly popular narrative embodied by Dan Savage’s ubiquitous internet promise: “It gets better.” As barriers to equal treatment under the law are removed and the state incorporates gender and sexual diversity under its protective umbrella — marriage rights extended, prohibitions to military service lifted, etc — queer politics get folded into the progressive march of the West toward equity and tolerance.

But what about for queer people whose land is violently occupied by the very body politic going about all this incorporating? As Scott Lauria Morgensen powerfully articulates in his new book, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Indigenous Two-Spirit activists work for both decolonization and sexual freedom within their homelands, resisting state incorporation, cultural appropriation, and narratives of their “disappearance.” Brilliantly extending (and intervening) on the work of earlier theorists, Morgensen traces how modern sexual identities are built upon the replacement of indigenous sexuality and the development of settler colonialism in what is now the United States and Canada. “Native and queer studies must regard settler colonialism as a key condition of modern sexuality on stolen land,” Morgensen argues, “and use this analysis to explain the power of settler colonialism among Native and non-Native People.”

This is not simply an indictment. Morgensen shows how conversations between Natives and non-Natives can open up new frameworks for political activism and scholarly research, so long as they remain accountable to the ongoing colonization of Native lands. As mainstream LGBTQ organizations abandon their social movement pasts, Morgensen work is a clarion call for a new wave of decolonial queer organizing.

In a world of painfully narrow academic monographs, rare is the work that teams with ideas, engagements, and interventions across a wide terrain of social life. In The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Jodi Byrd has produced such a book.

Byrd, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and assistant professor of American Indian studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, follows the transit of paradigmatic “Indianness” through the pathways of colonialism, race, and empire. She engages not only the titans of critical theory but the substance of everyday politics, and finds an often disavowed indigeneity in places as disparate as Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Jonestown Massacre, the development of astronomical sciences and the origins of blues music. Central to this wide-ranging project is a fundamental proposition that in this perhaps terminal phase of American empire, reckoning with – and redressing – the ongoing colonization of Native lands and Native people is more vital than ever.

“Bringing indigeneity and Indians front and center to discussions of U.S. empire as it has traversed across Atlantic and Pacific worlds is a necessary intervention at this historical moment,” Byrd writes, “precisely because it is through the elisions, erasures, enjambments, and repetitions of Indianness that one might see the stakes in decolonial, restorative justice tied to land, life, and grievability.”

Anyone who’s turned on the television in the past several decades is familiar with the ubiquitous before-and-after picture. On the left, your present state: undesirable, out of shape, balding perhaps. Add ingredient X – maybe a fad diet or a hair transplant – and the picture on the right shows your new and improved future. While this visual juxtaposition might seem harmless enough – save for the whole manipulative advertising thing – it has a rather more nefarious history in the United States, bound intimately, like so much, with the question of race.

The before-and-after pictures were a favorite of Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the pioneering Carlisle Indian School, where in the late 19th and early 20th century, Native American children from the recently pacified West were brought thousands of miles to a military base outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Haggard by the exhausting and traumatic train ride, Pratt’s photographer would snap the “before” picture, using props and bad lighting to emphasize the alleged “savagery” of the newly arrived children. Months later, once the students were fitted in contemporary Euroamerican fashion, their hair cut short, and illuminated by soft-lighting, the “after” photo was snapped. These dual images – attesting to the supposedly civilizing effects of the boarding school – were distributed to government elites and the American public, proof that the indigenous population of the continent could be molded in the image of the white settler.

In his impressive new book, The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School (University of New Mexico Press, 2011) Hayes Peter Mauro brings to bear his considerable skills as an art historian and critical theorist to deconstruct the visual culture produced at Carlisle. Placing them squarely in the context of triumphalist American myths and the popular pseudo-science of race, Mauro uses these photographs to ask powerful questions and arrive at some unsettling answers. It is a fascinating work, illuminating not only the troubling culture of the federal assimilation project, but the power of the image to mold both the observer and the observed.

For the past half century, Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12-step recovery program has been the dominant method for treating alcohol abuse in the United States. Reservation communities have been no exception. But as Erica Prussing vividly describes in her new book, White Man’s Water: The Politics of Sobriety in a Native American Community (University of Arizona Press, 2011), a one-size-fits-all approach to treatment does not, in fact, fit all.

An assistant professor of anthropology and community and behavior health at the University of Iowa, Prussing lived for three years on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, working with community organizations, building long-lasting relationships, and gathering testimonies of alcohol’s often disruptive impacts on the lives of many Northern Cheyenne. While many young women have embraced the 12-step program, others – particularly of the older generation – find its moral assumptions foreign and unhelpful. What emerges from Prussing’s account is not a reductive and totalizing “Cheyenne culture” but rather a complex negotiation of tradition, community, and recovery in the face of persistent colonial challenges.  This nuance and attention to detail makes Prussing’s call for indigenous self-determination in health care all the more powerful.

“The history of Oklahoma is a history of movement, possession, and dispossession. It is American history told in fast-foward,” writes historian David A. Chang in the introduction to The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). “It captures the dynamics of global history in the middle of a continent.”

As a lifelong East-Coaster, I admit this initially struck me as perhaps hyperbolic. Oklahoma may indeed be fertile ground for scholars, particularly in Native American Studies, but American history in fast-forward? The dynamics of global history? These are concepts not generally associated in popular discourse with the Sooner state; certainly not for a New Yorker like myself.

David Chang has exploded my coastal arrogance. In this intellectual tour-de-force and gripping historical narrative, Chang illustrates how in the aftermath of the Creek Nation’s forced removal from the Southeast to Oklahoma, conflicts over landownership – present in every region but magnified in Indian Territory-cum-Oklahoma before and after the devastation of the Civil War and the Dawes Allotment  Act – provided the central staging ground for a complicated and often surprising formation of racial and national identities. From Creek’s struggle to maintain their national coherence against a colonial onslaught, to African American settlers seeking new opportunities in the land-rich West, to the agrarian radicalism of the early 20th century and the violent counterrevolution of white supremacy, Oklahoma indeed captures the dynamics of history. The Color of the Land shows exactly how.

Cathleen D. Cahill’s groundbreaking new work, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933 (UNC Press, 2011), lives up to the title: it is a social history in the best sense of the term. Paying close attention to the people who carried out federal Indian policy “on the ground,” Cahill uncovers a world of ambivalence, hubris and resistance in the usually monolithic story of Westward expansion and forced assimilation.

Cahill introduces us to fascinating characters like Minnie Braithwaite, a daughter of Virginia’s upper class, who defied her family’s wishes and headed out West and “teach the Indian.” And then there’s Esther Burnett Horne, a Shoshone woman fought colonialism even as she worked as an instructor for the Indian Service. “I wanted to provide [my students] with the same security and sense of self that my Indian teachers…had instilled in me,” she wrote. Indeed, the role of American Indian labor in the Indian Service is one of the most surprising and important chapters in Cahill’s work.

While Cahill carefully describes the details of federal policy  (the “intimate colonialism” which characterized so much of the Indian Service’s work), she does not eschew bigger questions. By placing the Indian Service in the broader narrative of American political development, Cahill emphasizes the centrality of the federal assimilation campaign to the creation of the modern American welfare state. In Federal Fathers and Mothers, Cahill has balanced micro and macro and, in so doing, realized much of the promise of social history.

When an Atlantic Coastline Railroad train pulled into Red Springs, North Carolina, the conductor faced a difficult dilemma. Whom to allow in coach class with whites and whom to relegate to the back? In an effort to clarify the matter, the mayor of neighboring Pembroke demanded that the railroad build three separate waiting rooms at the town train station.

Such confusion was common place in Robeson County, North Carolina, during the height of the Jim Crow era. That’s because Robeson is home to the Lumbee People, the largest Indian nation east of the Mississippi River and a thorn in the side of those who sought to maintain a simple black/white dichotomy in the South.

Malinda Mayor Lowery’s new book Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) dramatically rewrites accepted Jim Crow narratives. Not only did Indian communities persist in the U.S. South after the Removal – the period of ethnic cleansing generally cited as the denouement of indigenous peoples in the region – but they complicated the racial landscape in unexpected ways, negotiating a space of autonomy and independence with the forces of white supremacy in 20th century North Carolina.

Lowery, a Lumbee herself and assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, offers us that unique combination of scholarly rigor and passionate prose, exploring the complex process of identity formation in the face of – and occasionally in concert with – segregation, federal bureaucracy and the discourse of “race” and “blood.” For students and scholars of Native American Studies, Southern history, and the Jim Crow era, it is essential reading.

Essay collections are often a repository of an author’s lesser works, an attempt by publishers to milk every last penny from a well-regarded scholar. This is not the case with Jace Weaver’s new book Notes from a Miner’s Canary: Essays on the State of Native America (University of New Mexico Press, 2010). He is, indeed, a well-regarded scholar. As director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia and the author of a number of foundational texts in the field, Weaver can certainly command the academic gravitas necessary for published article collections.

But Notes from a Miner’s Canary is no mere repository. Weaver brilliantly harmonizes a number of diverse and compelling articles into a powerful primer for students and scholars of Native American Studies, moving deftly through environmentalism, NAGPRA, indigenous architecture, theology, literature, and far more. Grounded in a firm belief in the need for engaged scholarly work accountable to Native communities, Weaver writes with the passion of an advocate and the cool acumen of an intellectual. (Weaver is of course trained both as a lawyer and an academic)

If Weaver is indeed right that much of the field is a “mess” (a quote from the book’s previously published opening chapter which Weaver argues in this interview is often taken out of context), Notes from a Miner’s Canary is a formidable effort at creating a meaningful coherence: interdisciplinary openness, intellectual rigor, and political commitment.

For most non-native Americans, the Red Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s appeared out of nowhere. Convinced of triumphalist myths of the disappearing (or disappeared) Indian, white America relegated native communities to the margins of society. Then, “like a hurricane” (in the words of Robert Warrior and Paul Chaat Smith), the take-over of Alcatraz Island in 1969, the seizure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972, and finally the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee–a dramatic series of events which placed First Nations at the heart of the era’s great social upheavals.

But does this snapshot tell the whole story? In his fascinating new book Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), Bradley Shreve finds the roots of American Indian activism in the nascent inter-tribal organizing of the early 20th century and the various attempts at fashioning independent organizations of dedicated native youth over the following decades. In the process, Shreve demonstrates how the militant actions of the 1960s and 70s “followed in the footsteps of an earlier generation.” He writes, “Indeed, movements for social change do not emerge in a vacuum. They are built upon precedent, they incorporate and borrow ideas from the past, and they may find inspiration from contemporaries.” This is a story of the past informing the present, of movements building on tradition, and the dramatic arrival of an era of self-determination.

[Crossposted from New Books in History] Of all the events in American history, two are far and away the most troubling: slavery and the near-genocidal war against native Americans. In truth, we’ve dealt much better with the former than the latter. The slaves were emancipated. After a long and painful struggle, their descendants won their full civil rights. Though that struggle is not yet finished, near equality has been reached in many areas of American life. And almost all Americans understand that slavery was wrong. None of this can be said about the campaign against native Americans. Instead of emancipation, the Indians–or rather those left after the slaughter–were “removed” to reservations where their way of life was destroyed. After a long and painful struggle, many of their descendants are still in those reservations and living in poverty. They struggle still, but are not equal to other Americans by most measures. And many Americans refuse to believe that the U.S. was wrong in killing, sequestering, and impoverishing the native Americans.

They are wrong to do so, for we know what happened and why thanks to historians such as Heather Cox Richardson. In her eye-opening new book Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (Basic Books, 2010) she shows just how calculated, self-serving, and even spiteful the White assault on the Plains Indians was. Despite what they said (mostly to the Indians themselves), the Whites never had any real intention of allowing the Sioux and others to keep their land, maintain their way of life, or even to continue to exist. It was clear to them that the Indians would either become White (meaning would take up farming) or would go. The Whites weren’t exactly cynics; rather they were self-deceiving fatalists. They came to believe that destiny itself compelled them to assimilate or annihilate the Indians.

But destiny didn’t destroy the Plains Indians. The government of the United States of America did.