New Books In Native American Studies

Accounts of decolonization routinely neglect Indigenous societies in North America and Australasia, yet Native communities have made unique contributions to anticolonial thought and activism. David Myer Temin's book Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought (U Chicago Press, 2023) examines how twentieth-century Indigenous activists in North America debated questions of decolonization and self-determination, developing distinctive conceptual approaches that both resonate with and reformulate key strands in other civil rights and global decolonization movements. In contrast to decolonization projects that envisioned liberation through national independence, Indigenous theorists emphasized the self-determination of peoples against sovereign states and articulated a visionary politics of decolonization as care for the earth. Temin traces the interplay between anticolonial thought and practice across key indigenous thinkers. He shows how these insig

An ethnographic study based on decades of field research, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain: Nahua Sacred Journeys in Mexico's Huasteca Veracruzana (UP of Colorado, 2023) explores five sacred journeys to the peaks of venerated mountains undertaken by Nahua people living in northern Veracruz, Mexico. Punctuated with elaborate ritual offerings dedicated to the forces responsible for rain, seeds, crop fertility, and the well-being of all people, these pilgrimages are the highest and most elaborate form of Nahua devotion and reveal a sophisticated religious philosophy that places human beings in intimate contact with what Westerners call the forces of nature. Alan and Pamela Sandstrom document them for the younger Nahua generation, who live in a world where many are lured away from their communities by wage labor in urban Mexico and the United States. Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain contains richly detailed descriptions and analyses of ritual procedures as well as translations from the Nahuatl of core myths, chants per

The story of the British Empire is a familiar one: Britain came, it saw, it conquered, forging a glorious world empire upon which the sun never set. In fact, far from being the tale of a single nation imposing its will upon the world, the expanding British Empire frequently found itself frustrated by the power and tenacious resistance of the Indigenous and non-European people it encountered. From gruelling wars in Ireland to the failure to curtail North African Corsair states, all the way to the collapse of commercial operations in East Asia, British attempts to create an imperial enterprise often ended in disaster and even defeat.  In The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire (Ebury Press, 2023), David Veevers looks beyond the myths of triumph and into the realities of British misadventures in the early days of Empire, meeting the extraordinary Indigenous and non-European people across the world who were the real forces to be reckoned with. From the Indian Emperors who contained the nefari

In this interview James Fenelon discusses his new book entitled Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790, recently published with Routledge (2023). The book traces 500 years of European-American colonization and racialized dominance, expanding our common assumptions about the ways racialization was used to build capitalism and the modern world-system. Professor Fenelon draws on personal experience and the agency of understudied Native (and African) resistance leaders, to weave a story too often hidden or distorted in the annals of the academy, that remains invisible at many universities and historical societies.  Fenelon identifies three epochs of racial constructions, colonialism, and capitalism that created the USA. Indigenous nations, the first to be racialized on a global scale, African peoples, enslaved and brought to the Americas, and European immigrants. It offers a sweeping analysis of the forces driving the invasion, occupation, and exploitation of N

The conquest of Indigenous land in the eastern United States through corrupt treaties and genocidal violence laid the groundwork for the conquest of the American West. In Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation (Random House, 2023), acclaimed author Peter Stark exposes the fundamental conflicts at play through the little-known but consequential struggle between two extraordinary leaders. William Henry Harrison was born to a prominent Virginia family, the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He journeyed west, became governor of the vast Indiana Territory, and sought statehood by attracting settlers and imposing one-sided treaties. Tecumseh, by all accounts one of the nineteenth century's greatest leaders, belonged to an honored line of Shawnee warriors and chiefs. His father, killed while fighting the Virginians flooding into Kentucky, extracted a promise from his sons to "never give in" to the land-hungry Americans. An eloquent speaker,

Historian Alejandra Dubcovsky tells a story of war, slavery, loss, remembrance, and the women whose resilience and resistance transformed the colonial South. In exploring their lives she rewrites early American history, challenging the established male-centered narrative. In Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South (Yale UP, 2023), Dubcovsky reconstructs the lives of Native women—Timucua, Apalachee, Chacato, and Guale—to show how they made claims to protect their livelihoods, bodies, and families. Through the stories of the Native cacica who demanded her authority be recognized; the elite Spanish woman who turned her dowry and household into a source of independent power; the Floridiana who slapped a leading Native man in the town square; and the Black woman who ran a successful business at the heart of a Spanish town, Dubcovsky reveals the formidable women who claimed and used their power, shaping the history of the early South. Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWester

Today’s book is Indigenous DC: Native Peoples and the Nation’s First Capital (Georgetown UP, 2023), by Dr. Elizabeth Rule, which is the first and fullest account of the suppressed history and continuing presence of Native Americans in Washington, DC. Washington, DC, is Indian land, but Indigenous peoples are often left out of the national narrative of the United States and erased in the capital city. To redress this myth of invisibility, Indigenous DC shines a light upon the oft-overlooked contributions of tribal leaders and politicians, artists and activists to the rich history of the District of Columbia, and their imprint—at times memorialized in physical representations, and at other times living on only through oral history—upon this place. Inspired by Dr. Elizabeth Rule’s award-winning public history mobile app and decolonial mapping project Guide to Indigenous DC, this book brings together the original inhabitants who call the District their traditional territory, the diverse Indigenous diaspora who ha

The Republic Will Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression (University of Illinois Press, 2023) by Dr. Tariq D. Khan examines the long relationship between America’s colonising wars and virulent anticommunism. The colonising wars against Native Americans created the template for anticommunist repression in the United States. Dr. Khan’s analysis reveals bloodshed and class war as foundational aspects of capitalist domination and vital elements of the nation’s long history of internal repression and social control. Dr. Khan shows how the state wielded the tactics, weapons, myths, and ideology refined in America’s colonising wars to repress anarchists, labour unions, and a host of others labelled as alien, multi-racial, multi-ethnic urban rabble. The ruling classes considered radicals of all stripes to be anticolonial insurgents. As Dr. Khan charts the decades of red scares that began in the 1840s, he reveals how capitalists and government used much-practised counterinsurgency rhet

Today’s book is A Calm and Normal Heart: Stories (The Unnamed Press, 2022) by Chelsea T. Hicks. The heroes of A Calm and Normal Heart are modern-day adventurers—seeking out new places to call their own inside a nation to which they do not entirely belong. A member of the Osage tribe, Hicks’ stories are compelled by an overlooked diaspora happening inside America itself: that of young Native people. In stories like “Superdrunk,” “Tsexope,” and “Wets’a,” iPhone lifestyles co-mingle with ancestral connection, strengthening relationships or pushing people apart, while generational trauma haunts individual paths. Broken partnerships and polyamorous desire signal a fraught era of modern love, even as old ways continue to influence how people assess compatibility. In “By Alcatraz,” a Native student finds herself alone on campus over Thanksgiving break, seeking out new friendships during a national holiday she does not recognize. Leaping back in time, “A Fresh Start Ruined” inhabits the life of Florence, an Osage wom

Today’s guest is Edgar Garcia. Garcia’s new book Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Emergency takes nine words—“birds,” “wealth,” “caves,” “television,” “demons,” “migrations,” “love,” “the sun,” and “Mormons”—and weaves a rich transhistorical narrative about the Popul Vuh sacred narrative. In these pages, Garcia explores how this text emerged in conditions of historical violence and persisted through over three hundred years, becoming a touchstone for Mesoamerican religious studies, decolonial activism, and literary adaptation. Edgar Garcia is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. His previous books are Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019). He has also served as the guest editor of Fence, a literary magazine. Written during the COVID pandemic, Emergency was published in 2022. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant P

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.  Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

As the enduring "last frontier," Alaska proves an indispensable context for examining the form and function of American colonialism, particularly in the shift from western continental expansion to global empire. In this richly theorized work, Juliana Hu Pegues evaluates four key historical periods in U.S.-Alaskan history: the Alaskan purchase, the Gold Rush, the emergence of salmon canneries, and the World War II era. In each, Hu Pegues recognizes colonial and racial entanglements between Alaska Native peoples and Asian immigrants. In the midst of this complex interplay, the American colonial project advanced by differentially racializing and gendering Indigenous and Asian peoples, constructing Asian immigrants as "out of place" and Alaska Natives as "out of time." Counter to this space-time colonialism, Native and Asian peoples created alternate modes of meaning and belonging through their literature, photography, political organizing, and sociality. Offering an intersectional approach to U.S. empire, Indige

The history of the American West has typically been told in one of two ways: as triumph, or as tragedy. Stephen Aron, accomplished scholar of the West, Professor Emeritus at UCLA, and President of the Autry Museum of the American West, argues that both of these narratives flatten out what was actually a much more complicated story.  Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West (Oxford UP, 2022), Aron zooms in on several moments of contingency in the Western past, moments when people of often radically different backgrounds came together to build community, or at least lived peacefully, despite their differences. Although these moments eventually fell apart, Aron argues that they show that the past was unwritten until it came to pass, and that our own uncertain future is the same. Peace and Friendship offers important lessons about the power of history and contingency, and underscores the unsettled nature of human events and our capacity for overcoming even our deepest differences. Learn m

The Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River provides electricity for some forty million people, and is one of the largest sources of water in the American West. It is also a testament to American settler colonialism, writes UT Austin history professor Erika Bsumek in The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau (U Texas Press, 2023). This region of the Southwest has been inhabited and irrigated by Indigenous societies since time immemorial, groups which were only recently (and partially) dispossessed by LDS Church settlers and by the US government. Bsumek argues that the structures, both physical and social, which form the foundation of Glen Canyon Dam - including science, law, and religion - make it a blueprint for structural dispossession, and a model which the United States would use to claim valuable Native lands. Yet, a mammoth undertaking such as this cannot be built without massive environmental change, and from the very beginning, both Indigenous and non-I

The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) examines the competing versions of manhood at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School between 1879 and 1918. Students often arrived at Carlisle already engrained with Indigenous ideals of masculinity. On many occasions these ideals would come into conflict with the models of manhood created by the school’s original superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt believed that Native Americans required the “embrace of civilization,” and he emphasized the qualities of self-control, Christian ethics, and retaliatory masculinity. He encouraged sportsmanship and fair play over victory. Pratt’s successors, however, adopted a different approach, and victory was enshrined as the main objective of Carlisle sports. As major stars like Jim Thorpe and Lewis Tewanima came to the fore, this change in approach created a conflict over manhood within the school: should the competitive athletic mode

Five hundred years ago, a flotilla landed on the coast of Yucatán under the command of the Spanish conquistador Hérnan Cortés. While the official goal of the expedition was to explore and to expand the Christian faith, everyone involved knew that it was primarily about gold and the hunt for slaves. That a few hundred Spaniards destroyed the Aztec empire--a highly developed culture--is an old chestnut, because the conquistadors, who had every means to make a profit, did not succeed alone. They encountered groups such as the Tlaxcaltecs, who suffered from the Aztec rule and were ready to enter into alliances with the foreigners to overthrow their old enemy. In addition, the conquerors benefited from the diseases brought from Europe, which killed hundreds of thousands of locals.  Drawing on both Spanish and indigenous sources, this account of the conquest of Mexico from 1519 to 1521 not only offers a dramatic narrative of these events--including the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and the flight of the

Quinoa's new status as a superfood has altered the economic fortunes of Quechua farmers in the Andean highlands. Linda J. Seligmann journeys to the Huanoquite region of Peru to track the mixed blessings brought about by the surging worldwide popularity of this "exquisite grain." Focusing on how Indigenous communities have confronted globalization, Seligmann examines the influence of food politics, development initiatives, and the region's agrarian history on present-day quinoa production among Huanoquiteños. She also looks at the human stories behind these transformations, from the work of quinoa brokers to the ways Huanoquite's men and women navigate the shifts in place and power occurring in their homes and communities. Finally, Seligmann considers how the consequences of nearby mining may impact Huanoquiteños' ability to farm quinoa and thrive in their environment, and the efforts they are taking to resist these threats to their way of life.  The untold story behind the popular health food, Quinoa: Food Po

California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives--the first slaves transported into California--and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California's carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls were sold in caged brothels in early San Francisco. Indian boarding schools supplied new farms and hotels with unfree child workers. By looking west to California, Jean Pfaelzer upends our understanding of slavery as a North-South struggle and reveals how the enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. In unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California gorged on slavery, an appetite that persists today in a global trade in human beings lured by promises of jobs but who instead are imprisoned in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows, or

Eighty years on, Lin Poyer's book War at the Margins: Indigenous Experiences in World War II (U Hawaii Press, 2022) offers a global and comparative view of the impact of World War II on Indigenous societies. Indigenous peoples, Poyer shows, had a distinct experience of WWII, as those on the margins of Allied and Axis empires and nation-states were drawn in as soldiers, scouts, guides, laborers, and victims. Using historical and ethnographic sources, Poyer examines how Indigenous communities emerged from the trauma of the wartime era with social forms and cultural ideas that laid the foundations for their twenty-first-century emergence as players on the world’s political stage. This book is available open access here. Lin Poyer is a cultural anthropologist and professor emerita at the University of Wyoming. Holger Droessler is an Assistant Professor of History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on the intersection of empire and labor in the Pacific. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

Today’s book is: The Lost Journals of Sacajewea (Milkweed Editions, 2023), by Debra Magpie Earling, which is a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea. Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery.  In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history. Raised among the Lemhi Shoshone, in this telling the young Sacajewea is bright and bold, growing strong from the hard work of “learning all ways to survive”: gathering berries, water, roots, and wood; butchering buffalo, antelope, and deer; catching salmon and snaring rabbits; weaving baskets and listening to the stories of her elders. When her village is raided and her beloved Appe and Bia are killed, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gamb