National Native American Heritage Month

The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book is a powerful and historically accurate graphic portrayal of Indigenous resistance to the European colonization of the Americas, beginning with the Spanish invasion under Christopher Columbus and ending with the Six Nations land reclamation in Ontario in 2006.

Rosalyn R. LaPier demonstrates that Blackfeet history is incomplete without an understanding of the Blackfeet people’s relationship and mode of interaction with the “invisible reality” of the supernatural world. Religious beliefs provided the Blackfeet with continuity through privations and changing times. The stories they passed to new generations and outsiders reveal the fundamental philosophy of Blackfeet existence, namely, the belief that they could alter, change, or control nature to suit their needs and that they were able to do so with the assistance of supernatural allies.

With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the "First Indian War" (later named King Philip's War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. In reading seventeenth-century sources alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history, Brooks's pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England.

In this groundbreaking book, the first Navajo to earn a doctorate in history seeks to rewrite Navajo history. Here she presents a thought-provoking examination of the construction of the history of the Navajo people (Diné, in the Navajo language) that underlines the dichotomy between Navajo and non-Navajo perspectives on the Diné past. She reveals how Navajo narratives, including oral histories and stories kept by matrilineal clans, serve as vehicles to convey Navajo beliefs and values. She argues that these same stories, read with an awareness of Navajo creation narratives, reveal previously unrecognized Navajo perspectives on the past. She contends that a similarly culture-sensitive re-viewing of the Diné can lead to the production of a Navajo-centered history.

In his new preface to this paperback edition, the author observes, "The Indian world has changed so substantially since the first publication of this book that some things contained in it seem new again." Indeed, it seems that each generation of whites and Indians will have to read and reread Vine Deloria’s Manifesto for some time to come, before we absorb his special, ironic Indian point of view and what he tells us, with a great deal of humor, about U.S. race relations, federal bureaucracies, Christian churches, and social scientists.

For five centuries -- from Columbus's arrival in 1492 to the U.S. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s, to the renewed assault in the 1970s -- our continent's indigenous people endured the most massive and systematic act of genocide in the history of the world. In Eating Fire, Tasting Blood, twenty established and up-and-coming American Indian writers from disparate nations and tribes offer stirring reflections on the history of their people. This is not a collection of essays about Native Americans but rather a collection BY Native Americans -- the story of native holocaust on a tribe-by-tribe level as told by those few who have been fortunate enough to survive.

Beginning with the tribes' devastating loss of land and the forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools, David Treuer shows how the period of greatest adversity also helped to incubate a unifying Native identity. He traces how conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of their self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is an essential, intimate history - and counter-narrative - of a resilient people in a transformative era.

Unpacks the twenty-one most common myths and misconceptions about Native Americans In this enlightening book, scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history that have misinformed generations. "All the Real Indians Died Off" challenges readers to rethink what they have been taught about Native Americans and history.

In the face of a new lightly romanticized view of Native Americans, Killing the White Man's Indian bravely confronts the current myths and often contradictory realities of tribal life today. Based on three years of research on the Native American reservations, and written without a hidden conservative bias or politically correct agenda, Killing the White Man's Indian takes on Native American politics and policies today in all their contradictory--and controversial-guises.

These impressive essays by eight Native American leaders and scholars present persuasive evidence that the American colonists and U.S. founding fathers borrowed from the Iroquois Confederacy and other Indian political institutions in drafting the U.S. Constitution and in creating democratic traditions. This groundbreaking work, which was written into the Congressional Record, has major implications for future relations between Indian tribes and the governments of the United States and other nations. It presents the strongest case ever made for Native American sovereignty.

Treuer, an Ojibwe scholar and cultural preservationist, answers the most commonly asked questions about American Indians, both historical and modern. He gives a frank, funny, and personal tour of what's up with Indians, anyway.

Devon Mihesuah goes beyond simply providing responses to common stereotypes. She provides the reader with assistance in efforts to improve understanding of her peoples, a valuable contribution in bringing greater clarity to important issues. She created a good sourcebook for dispelling misconceptions and negative stereotypes about American Indians. These beliefs and attitudes exist and these statements are made in academic settings.

Here, an indigenous researcher issues a clarion call for the decolonization of research methods. In setting an agenda for planning and implementing indigenous research, the author shows how such programmes are part of the wider project of reclaiming control over indigenous ways of knowing and being.

A first-of-its-kind anthology of historical articles by Indigenous scholars, framed in assumptions and concepts derived from the authors' respective Indigenous worldviews. Writings stand in sharp contrast to works by historians who may belong to tribes but work within the Euroamerican worldview

Currently, there are three approaches to studying American Indians: from how white Americans approach Indian studies, from the dynamics or exchange of Indian-white relations and from the Indian point of view. Written primarily from inside the Native world, but fully cognizant of the American cultures outside of that world, his unique voice speaks to a need for understanding the interior Native world: a world in which linear thinking is atypical and circularity is preferable.

This provocative collection of essays reveals the passionate voice of a Native American feminist intellectual. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a poet and literary scholar, grapples with issues she encountered as a Native American in academia. Cook-Lynn emphasizes that her essays move beyond the narrowly autobiographical, not just about gender and power, not just focused on multiculturalism and diversity, but are about intellectual and political issues that engage readers and writers in Native American studies. Studying the "Indian," Cook-Lynn reminds us, is not just an academic exercise but a matter of survival for the lifeways of tribal peoples. Her goal in these essays is to open conversations that can make tribal life and academic life more responsive to one another.