Thanksgiving Time Resources at SUNY Broome

Silko dramatizes the often desperate struggle of native peoples in the Americas to keep, at all costs, the core of their culture: their way of seeing, their way of believing, their way of being.

Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and senseless violence, Tayo searches for another kind of comfort and resolution. Tayo's quest leads him back to the Indian past and its traditions, to beliefs about witchcraft and evil, and to the ancient stories of his people. The search itself becomes a ritual, a curative ceremny that defeats the most virulent of afflictions—despair.

Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists explores the artistic achievements of Native women and establishes their rightful place in the art world. This landmark book includes works of art from antiquity to the present, made in a variety of media from textiles and beadwork to video and digital arts. It showcases artists from more than seventy-five Indigenous tribes to reveal the ingenuity and innovation that have always been foundational to the art of Native women. Women have long been the creative force behind Native art. Hearts of Our People accompanies the first major exhibition of artwork by Native women, presented in close cooperation with top Native women artists and scholars, honoring the achievements of over 115 artists from the United States and Canada spanning over 1,000 years. Their triumphs - from pottery, textiles, and painting, to photographic portraits, to a gleaming El Camino - show astonishing innovation and technical mastery. Beautifully illustrated and enriched by the personal reflections, historical research, and artistic insights of leading scholars and artists in the field, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists pays tribute to the vital role and creative force of Native women artists, now and throughout time.

Seale and Slapin are with Oyate, a community-based Native organization located in Berkeley, California, dedicated to the honest portrayal of the lives, traditional arts and literature, and histories of Native Americans. Their unique guide brings attention to some of the gifted Native writers and illustrators published by Native and small presses du

Interviews with religious leaders from various Indian tribes share their world views.

"All those interested in Indigenous food systems, sovereignty issues, or environment, and their path toward recovery should read this powerful book." --Kathie L. Beebe, American Indian Quarterly Centuries of colonization and other factors have disrupted indigenous communities' ability to control their own food systems. This volume explores the meaning and importance of food sovereignty for Native peoples in the United States, and asks whether and how it might be achieved and sustained. Unprecedented in its focus and scope, this collection addresses nearly every aspect of indigenous food sovereignty, from revitalizing ancestral gardens and traditional ways of hunting, gathering, and seed saving to the difficult realities of racism, treaty abrogation, tribal sociopolitical factionalism, and the entrenched beliefs that processed foods are superior to traditional tribal fare. The contributors include scholar-activists in the fields of ethnobotany, history, anthropology, nutrition, insect ecology, biology, marine environmentalism, and federal Indian law, as well as indigenous seed savers and keepers, cooks, farmers, spearfishers, and community activists. After identifying the challenges involved in revitalizing and maintaining traditional food systems, these writers offer advice and encouragement to those concerned about tribal health, environmental destruction, loss of species habitat, and governmental food control.    

The definitive account of the Ghost Dance religion, which led to the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 Winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History In 1890, on Indian reservations across the West, followers of a new religion danced in circles until they collapsed into trances. In an attempt to suppress this new faith, the US Army killed over two hundred Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek. In God's Red Son, historian Louis Warren offers a startling new view of the religion known as the Ghost Dance, from its origins in the visions of a Northern Paiute named Wovoka to the tragedy in South Dakota. To this day, the Ghost Dance remains widely mischaracterized as a primitive and failed effort by Indian militants to resist American conquest and return to traditional ways. In fact, followers of the Ghost Dance sought to thrive in modern America by working for wages, farming the land, and educating their children, tenets that helped the religion endure for decades after Wounded Knee. God's Red Son powerfully reveals how Ghost Dance teachings helped Indians retain their identity and reshape the modern world.

Indian Country analyzes the works of Anglo writers and artists who encountered American Indians in the course of their travels in the Southwest during the one-hundred-year period beginning in 1840. Martin Padget looks first at the accounts produced by government-sponsored explorers, most notably John Wesley Powell's writings about the Colorado Plateau. He goes on to survey the writers who popularized the region in fiction and travelogue, including Helen Hunt Jackson and Charles F. Lummis. He also introduces us to Eldridge Ayer Burbank, an often-overlooked artist who between 1897 and 1917 made thousands of paintings and drawings of Indians from over 140 western tribes.

Over forty speeches by the leaders of twenty-two tribes reflect the Indian's thoughts and feelings on the advance of white settlers.

In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers. Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people centre-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States.

'This book represents a major effort to bring Amerindian poetry to the reader in such a way that the total poetry, the dance, the vowel changes, the pauses, the movement, the interaction between speaker and audience is made evident...' -John Demos, Library Journal

Lynn Stephen's innovative ethnography follows indigenous Mexicans from two towns in the state of Oaxaca--the Mixtec community of San Agustín Atenango and the Zapotec community of Teotitlán del Valle--who periodically leave their homes in Mexico for extended periods of work in California and Oregon. Demonstrating that the line separating Mexico and the United States is only one among the many borders that these migrants repeatedly cross (including national, regional, cultural, ethnic, and class borders and divisions), Stephen advocates an ethnographic framework focused on transborder, rather than transnational, lives. Yet she does not disregard the state: She assesses the impact migration has had on local systems of government in both Mexico and the United States as well as the abilities of states to police and affect transborder communities. Stephen weaves the personal histories and narratives of indigenous transborder migrants together with explorations of the larger structures that affect their lives. Taking into account U.S. immigration policies and the demands of both commercial agriculture and the service sectors, she chronicles how migrants experience and remember low-wage work in agriculture, landscaping, and childcare and how gender relations in Oaxaca and the United States are reconfigured by migration. She looks at the ways that racial and ethnic hierarchies inherited from the colonial era--hierarchies that debase Mexico's indigenous groups--are reproduced within heterogeneous Mexican populations in the United States.

A work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance that shows how two centuries of Indigenous struggle created the movement proclaiming "Water is Life" In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century, attracting tens of thousands of Indigenous and non-Native allies from around the world. Its slogan "Mni Wiconi"--Water is Life--was about more than just a pipeline. Water Protectors knew this battle for Native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue. In Our History is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance leading to the #NoDAPL movement from the days of the Missouri River trading forts through the Indian Wars, the Pick-Sloan dams, the American Indian Movement, and the campaign for Indigenous rights at the United Nations. While a historian by trade, Estes also draws on observations from the encampments and from growing up as a citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires), making Our History is the Future at once a work of history, a personal story, and a manifesto.

First published in paperback by UNM Press in 1976, The Way to Rainy Mountain has sold over 200,000 copies. "The paperback edition of The Way to Rainy Mountain was first published twenty-five years ago. One should not be surprised, I suppose, that it has remained vital, and immediate, for that is the nature of story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradition, which exists in a dimension of timelessness. I was first told these stories by my father when I was a child. I do not know how long they had existed before I heard them. They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the earth. "The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself."--from the new Preface

This pioneering work, first published in 1986, documents the continuing vitality of American Indian traditions and the crucial role of women in those traditions.

"Selections range from recollections of first buffalo hunts to a story of a rebel girl in the 1960s, from remembrances of the mandatory boarding schools in the early part of the century to tales of modern suburban alienation. Here are short stories, excerpts from novels, and autobiographical sketches, from Canada and the United States, by the best-loved names in Native American writing. And here, too, are funny and haunting stories from provocative new and lesser-known voices." "A collection of pain, love, youthful passion, mischief, anger, betrayal, and healing, Growing Up Native American is essential reading for anyone interested in the experiences of Native American people. Including selections from acclaimed works by some of the most accomplished prose stylists and story-tellers writing today it is an excellent introduction to one of the world's great literatures." Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"To Native Americans, nature and art are undeniably interwined. Creating a work of art - or even a tool or weapon - meant paying reverence to the cosmic forces of the Earth's spirit. With over 100 color photographs, In The Spirit Of Mother Earth shows how nature has influenced the exquisite handiwork of Native American people through the ages." "Divided by region, this book looks back in time to show us how the once-abundant resources inspired images of whales and bears in the crafts of such tribes as the Tlingit, Makah, and Chinook; how the wide-open skies and huge herds of buffalo became common motifs in Plains Indian art; and how the mountains, rivers, and vast woods of the East appeared in masks and other carvings of the Mohawk, Iroquois, and other Woodland tribes. What these people knew, and what was sadly overlooked by invading European cultures, is that harmony comes from respecting nature, not taking from her."--Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In Indian Voices, Alison Owings takes readers on a fresh journey across America, east to west, north to south, and around again. Owings's most recent oral history--engagingly written in a style that entertains and informs--documents what Native Americans say about themselves, their daily lives, and the world around them. Young and old from many tribal nations speak with candor, insight, and (unknown to many non-Natives) humor about what it is like to be a Native American in the twenty-first century. Through intimate interviews many also express their thoughts about the sometimes staggeringly ignorant, if often well-meaning, non-Natives they encounter--some who do not realize Native Americans still exist, much less that they speak English, have cell phones, use the Internet, and might attend powwows and power lunches. Indian Voices, an inspiring and important contribution to the literature about the original Americans, will make every reader rethink the past--and present--of the United States.

"In this book, Virginia Peters uses women's accounts, the strong oral tradition of the people, their myths and creation stories, and anthropological and archeological data to examine this vitality. She even follows the life cycle of a representative woman, and explores female farming, trading, and hunting activities, the organization of village life, and the culture of war. Basic to village society, Peters shows, was deep faith in an order where the generative female principle had primacy, sustaining and defining the people and everything in their world from sun to rain to bison, stones, and corn."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This timely new book surveys the artistic traditions of indigenous North America, from those of ancient cultures such as Adena, Hopewell, Mississippian, and Anasazi to the work of modern artists like Earnest Spybuck, Fred Kabotie, Dick West, T. C. Cannon, and Gerald McMaster. The text is organized geographically and draws upon the testimonies of oral tradition, Native American history, and the latest research in North American archaeology. Recent art historical scholarship has helped restore, to a large degree, some understanding of the identities and cultural roles of Native American artists and the social contexts of the objects they created. Native American art is often discussed simply as a cultural production rather than the work of individual artists who made objects to fufill social and cultural purposes; this book focuses as much as possible on the artists themselves, their cultural identities, and the objects they made even when the names of the individual artists remain unrecoverable. But this is not a book of artists' biographies. It seeks to inform a general readership about the history of Native American art with a lively narrative full of historical incident and illustrated with provocative and superlative works of art. It explores the tension between artistic continuities spanning thousands of years and the startlingly fresh innovations that resulted from specific historical circumstances. The narrative weaves together so-called "traditional" arts, "tourist" arts, and Native American art of today by taking the point of view of their particular and local histories--the artists, their communities, and audiences.

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. Then, 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.

"A highway and snowy field just outside of Fargo, North Dakota, become an arena in which no encounter is meaningless, no event without echo, no simple hope impossible to realize. Stranded together in a blizzard, each of Jack Mauser's former wives tells the secret tale of burning love that will save her. Their stories repair wounded hearts as their revelations, both comic and painful, blast through the walls between them." "Jack Mauser is a big and passionate man. Though initially central to each woman's tale, during a long night of shared confidences he becomes peripheral to their feelings for one another. There is Eleanor - spoiled, sensual, brainy; Candice - both tougher and more vulnerable than she can admit, especially once she is faced with her attraction to another woman; Marlis - a single mother caught up in a cycle of conflicting wishes; and Dot - both true and desperate, Jack's last and fiercest wife." Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States Since 1945 is the first major volume of its kind to focus on Native literatures in a postcolonial context. Written by a team of noted Native and non-Native scholars, these essays consider the complex social and political influences that have shaped American Indian literatures in the second half of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on core themes of identity, sovereignty, and land. In his essay comprising part I of the volume, Eric Cheyfitz argues persuasively for the necessary conjunction of Indian literatures and federal Indian law from Apess to Alexie. Part II is a comprehensive survey of five genres of literature: fiction (Arnold Krupat and Michael Elliott), poetry (Kimberly Blaeser), drama (Shari Huhndorf), nonfiction (David Murray), and autobiography (Kendall Johnson), and discusses the work of Vine Deloria Jr., N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Sherman Alexie, among many others. Drawing on historical and theoretical frameworks, the contributors examine how American Indian writers and critics have responded to major developments in American Indian life and how recent trends in Native writing build upon and integrate traditional modes of storytelling.

This comprehensive look at Native American groups in the southwestern United States is one of the first to provide both ethnographic research and Native American viewpoints. Included are chapters on the Pueblos, the Hopi, and the Zuni; the Pimans, the Yaqui, and the River Yumans; the Upland Yumans, the Apache, the Navajo, and the Southern Paiute. It explores each group's environmental adaptation, linguistic affiliation, social organization, history, world view, material culture, and ceremonial institutions. Native Americans speak about contemporary issues such as the repatriation of sacred objects, reservation gambling, preservation of native plants, and the philosophy behind tribal colleges. "The combination of a scholarly and lyrical style makes Native Peoples of the Southwest highly informative and a pleasure to read. Reminiscent in its historical truthfulness of Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, this is a scholarly text that American Indians would want for their own children's higher education. And a must read for non-Indians who want to understand the true history of Southwestern American Indians. Native Peoples of the Southwest authoritatively answers why Indian people persistently and proudly are committed to preserving and maintaining their language, culture, and traditions within a society that nearly annihilated them, and provides hope that those who read it will join American Indians in cherishing and supporting the preservation of these living cultural treasures that bless this great land known for a short historical time as America."--Glenn Johnson, M. Ed. (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma)

Nine tales, selected and retold here by anthropologist and author Theodora Kroeber for the adult general-interest reader. The new foreword by her son, Karl Kroeber, provides context about the author's methods and describes his own personal connection to the stories themselves.

Based on the work of anthropologist collectors, this compendium of more than 100 Native American chants and songs revises and updates a prior edition out of print since 1989. "These poems are not translations," argues Swann. They're versions that have gone through "a series of mediations and filters and exist somewhere between the individual lyric voice" and a diverse, multileveled Native American imaginative-mystical identity. Whether versions, translations, or poems, whether sung at a Crazy Dance, potlatch, corn-grinding, or curative or marriage ceremony, whether celebrating buffalo, maize, red fox, or tobacco, these works capture the "otherness" of the primeval spirit of the Native American fusion of natural and supernatural, animal and deity. Originally performed aloud, these "verbal artifacts"--which are sometimes breathtakingly pure, sometimes obscure--reveal that there can be no "conventional or single notion of "the Indian."

An illuminating look at Native origins and lifeways, a treasure for all who value Native wisdom and the stories that keep it alive.

A thought-provoking collection of searing prose from a Sioux woman that covers race, identity, assimilation, and perceptions of Native American culture Zitkala-Sa wrestled with the conflicting influences of American Indian and white culture throughout her life. Raised on a Sioux reservation, she was educated at boarding schools that enforced assimilation and was witness to major events in white-Indian relations in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Tapping her troubled personal history, Zitkala-Sa created stories that illuminate the tragedy and complexity of the American Indian experience. In evocative prose laced with political savvy, she forces new thinking about the perceptions, assumptions, and customs of both Sioux and white cultures and raises issues of assimilation, identity, and race relations that remain compelling today.

A CIRCLE OF NATIONS is a unique collection of photographs & writings by Native American artists & authors, a reflection of contemporary Indian life viewed from the Native perspective. A CIRCLE OF NATIONS is an open forum where Indian people speak their own words & create their own images. More than thirty writers & photographers have contributed to A CIRCLE OF NATIONS, all of them among the most respected & promising in their fields. Representing more than twenty-five tribes spanning North America, they truly are a circle of Indian nations. A CIRCLE OF NATIONS takes an intimate look at the thoughts, feelings & realities of present day Native Americans. It covers complex issues such as identity, family, community, faith & the continued existence of the People. It challenges the notion that Native cultures are things of the past, as if the only real Indians are "traditional" ones. These words & pictures are evidence that the tradition also dwells in the present, that it changes as conditions change. And it is this universal power to improvise, to re-invent oneself & one's people, that keeps Native cultures strong & vital. Mindful of the past & filled with the promise of creative change, A CIRCLE OF NATIONS is the fabric of this new tradition.

Tommy Orange's first novel is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen, and it introduces a brilliant new author at the start of a major career. There There is a relentlessly paced multigenerational story about violence and recovery, memory and identity, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people. It tells the story of twelve characters, each of whom have private reasons for traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow

Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the U.S. settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history.Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture and in the highest offices of government and the military.Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples' history radically reframes U.S. history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.

For fans of Angie Thomas and Tommy Orange, Angeline Boulley's debut novel, Firekeeper's Daughter , is a groundbreaking YA thriller about a Native teen who must root out the corruption in her community. Eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine has never quite fit in, both in her hometown and on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. She dreams of a fresh start at college, but when family tragedy strikes, Daunis puts her future on hold to look after her fragile mother. The only bright spot is meeting Jamie, the charming new recruit on her brother Levi's hockey team. Yet even as Daunis falls for Jamie, she senses the dashing hockey star is hiding something. Everything comes to light when Daunis witnesses a shocking murder, thrusting her into an FBI investigation of a lethal new drug. Reluctantly, Daunis agrees to go undercover, drawing on her knowledge of chemistry and Ojibwe traditional medicine to track down the source. But the search for truth is more complicated than Daunis imagined, exposing secrets and old scars

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowing together to reveal what it means to see humans as "the younger brothers of creation." As she explores these themes, she circles toward a central argument: The awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the world. Once we begin to listen for the languages of other beings, we can begin to understand the innumerable life-giving gifts the world provides us and learn to offer our thanks, our care, and our own gifts in return.

The Round House won the National Book Award for fiction. One of the most revered novelists of our time--a brilliant chronicler of Native-American life--Louise Erdrich returns to the territory of her bestselling, Pulitzer Prize finalist The Plague of Doves with The Round House, transporting readers to the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. It is an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family. Riveting and suspenseful, arguably the most accessible novel to date from the creator of Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and The Bingo Palace, Erdrich's The Round House is a page-turning masterpiece of literary fiction--at once a powerful coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a tender, moving novel of family, history, and culture.