New Books In Native American Studies

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 impo

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 denouem

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

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

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. Th